[R-sig-Fedora] evince not showing "greek" and "math" in *.pdf plots
Tim Taylor
t|m@t@y|or @end|ng |rom h|ddene|eph@nt@@co@uk
Mon Mar 11 15:16:48 CET 2024
On Mon, 11 Mar 2024, at 1:15 PM, Martin Maechler wrote:
> >>>>> 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
> >>
Apologies Martin - this *is not* working as of Fedora 39. I just had different symbols missing that I missed when checking (e.g. the sigma summation symbol).
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will pop along to help.
Tim
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