[R] set different font family for strings in mtext or text?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

See ?par: check the 'family' paramater.
You can select 'family' for each call to mtext or text.

However, mixing families is rather ugly, and there are font families 
that cover both English and Chinese.

Note that the main problem with postscript() and pdf() is the limited 
support in those languages for non-8-bit character encodings: R cannot 
magically remove restrictions of languages designed in the 1970s.
See also http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2006-2.pdf 
(referenced from ?pdf)

Users of other OSes have the option of using cairographics-based 
devices (e.g. cairo_pdf), and so will Windows' users as from 2.14.0 
(which is in RC): however, the font flexibility is far less on 
Windows.

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011, Jinsong Zhao wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Is it possible to set different font family for strings in mtext or text?
>
> For example, on windows platform with windows() device:
>
> plot(1:10, type = "n")
> text(5,5, "Chinese (English)") #Chinese for Chinese characters
>
> it will give the correct Chinese and English characters with two different 
> font family, i.e., English character in default sans family, and Chinese 
> character in the system default font family (it seems that the Chinese font 
> family can not be set or changed).

It certainly can, and the rw-FAQ describes how to do so.

> However, when using pdf() or postscript(), if setting the font family to 
> "Times", then error message will appear:
> conversion failure on '...' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for...
>
> When set the family "song" (a CJK font family), the English character will be 
> displayed in that CJK font family.
>
> I hope to know, is there a mechanism that can be used to set different font 
> family for one string, e.g., if one character can not be find in the default 
> font family, then search for another font family?

You have to specify the family: R will not guess what you wanted.

> Any suggestions or comments will be really appreciated?
>
> Regards,
> Jinsong
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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