[R-sig-Fedora] evince not showing "greek" and "math" in *.pdf plots
Martin Maechler
m@ech|er @end|ng |rom @t@t@m@th@ethz@ch
Mon Mar 11 14:15:51 CET 2024
>>>>> Tim Taylor
>>>>> on Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:42:35 +0000 writes:
> Hi Martin
> Probably not the answer you're looking for but on the latest Fedora 39 (workstation edition) both locally, and on a freshly installed VM (with just R-core installed), all fonts render correctly for me in evince.
> $ evince --version
> GNOME Document Viewer 45.0
> $ R --version
> R version 4.3.3 (2024-02-29) -- "Angel Food Cake"
> Copyright (C) 2024 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
> Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> It may be worth sharing more details about your installation (e.g. Fedora version) to see if anyone has any ideas.
> Tim
Thank you, Tim.
Fedora is 38 :
$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version: :core-5.0-amd64:core-5.0-noarch:cxx-5.0-amd64:cxx-5.0-noarch:desktop-5.0-amd64:desktop-5.0-noarch:languages-5.0-amd64:languages-5.0-noarch:printing-5.0-amd64:printing-5.0-noarch
Distributor ID: Fedora
Description: Fedora release 38 (Thirty Eight)
Release: 38
Codename: ThirtyEight
$ evince --version
GNOME Document Viewer 44.3
R version does not matter at all.
Same phenomenon in several versions of R I have installed
simultaneously (from source).
As I mentioned, I'm slightly misusing the list for non-R problem
that I encounter a lot with R {because I like to use
"plotmath"}, so I apologize in advance.
Maybe it's rather a matter of fonts installed in
/usr/share/fonts/ ??
Martin
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2024, at 10:51 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>> This problem has bugged me for several years now,
>> and our own IT staff has tried a few things, but then never
>> cared enough to persist fixing it.
>>
>> It *is* a bug in evince, the standard pdf viewer on Fedora and
>> IIUC also quite few other Linux distributions, and
>> *not* a bug in R; hence I am asking for help/hints here.
>>
>> A very simple example:
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> (pdfil <- paste0("plotmath-example_R",
>> with(R.version, paste0(major, sub("[.]", "", minor))), ".pdf"))
>> ## "plomath-example_R433.pdf"
>>
>> pdf(pdfil)
>> example(plotmath); mtext(R.version.string)
>> dev.off()
>>
>> if(interactive())
>> system(paste("evince", pdfil, "&"))
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> The pdf contains 4 pages, and in all of them *some* of the math
>> symbols are replaced by open rectangles -- because evince does
>> not find the fonts it should.
>>
>> E.g.
>> - page 1: \pi is properly shown, \phi not
>> - page 2: all greek letters, \theta, \xi, \eta are *not* shown
>> ...
>>
>> Simply typing
>>
>> example(plotmath)
>>
>> in the R console will show you everything as it should be but is
>> not for us, using evince.
>>
>> However, *everything* is rendered correctly, if I use very old
>> 'xpdf' {which you may have to install
>>
>> ## OTOH: This always work fine with the very old 'xpdf' :
>> system(paste("xpdf", pdfil, "&"))
>>
>> So the fonts *are* somewhere on my machine, but evince does not
>> find them;
>>
>> How should our IT people fix this?
>>
>> IIRC they did install the Zapf Dingbats fonts -- which then are
>> found by xpdf but not by evince ?
>>
>>
>> Thank you in advance,
>> Martin
>>
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