[R] Using Unicode inside R's expression() command

[David Winsemius]

On Nov 9, 2013, at 11:01 AM, Sverre Stausland wrote:

> I'm using 'expression()' in R plots in order to get italicized text.
> But it appears as if I cannot use Unicode symbols inside 'expression'
> outside of ASCII characters. Is there some way I can work around this?
> My goal is to get the 'fi' ligature in various labels in my R barplots
> (together with italicized text). I think I could work around this if
> there was another way of italicizing selected characters in a string
> than using 'expression()'.
> 
> I'm using R for Windows version 3.0.2.
> 
>    CairoPDF(file = "Ligature1.pdf")
>    plot.new()
>    text(x =.5, y = .5, labels = "fi", family = "Times New Roman")
>    dev.off()
> 
>    CairoPDF(file = "Ligature2.pdf")
>    plot.new()
>    text(x =.5, y = .5, labels = expression(paste(italic(m), "u", "fi",
> italic(m), sep = "")), family = "Times New Roman")
>    dev.off()
> <lig1.png><lig2.png>

To the list readers: I posted a comment to the identical SO question that changing the font with CairoFonts before the CairoPDF call might be more effective. (I used a font name of "TimesNewRoman" rather than "Times New Roman" but testing with 

 CairoFontMatch(fontpattern="Times New Roman",sort=FALSE,verbose=TRUE)

... proved that the spaces were not causing problems. I happen to have a copy of Times New Roman since I have purchased MS Office, but I do not know if everyone would have that font installed. )

This succeeded
CairoFonts(
	regular="Roman-12:normal", italic="Roman-12:italic" 
)
# The default family is Helvetica on my machine running OSX 10.7.5
-- 

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA