[R-sig-Fedora] evince not showing "greek" and "math" in *.pdf plots
Iñaki Ucar
|uc@r @end|ng |rom |edor@project@org
Mon Mar 11 18:59:02 CET 2024
Martin, I wouldn't rule out an R issue yet. Fonts are... tricky. So I'm
cc'ing Paul Murrell here.
I tried several viewers here and I see the following: Chrome, Firefox and
Libreoffice Draw show the symbols; however, evince, okular and xournal++
agree on **not** showing the symbols. **If** there is a bug, the bug would
be in fontconfig, because these ones AFAIK properly delegate on fontconfig,
which is the system-wide component that decides what font substitution
should be made for any given font. However, I see:
$ fc-match Helvetica
NimbusSans-Regular.otf: "Nimbus Sans" "Regular"
which is the right choice. And okular confirms this by showing in a
properties dialog that it is substituting Helvetica with URW's Nimbus Sans
Regular. So why aren't the symbols displayed? My best guess is that this
has something to do with how R encodes such symbols. Paul introduced some
changes to fix similar issues for Cairo devices when Fedora dropped support
for Type 1 fonts, see [1]. Now, I'm no font expert, but it seems to me that
the pdf device may require similar fixes. (And why do xpdf or Firefox show
the glyphs... I have no idea. I guess they do their thing without asking
fontconfig).
[1]
https://blog.r-project.org/2020/04/17/changes-to-symbol-fonts-for-cairo-graphics-devices/
Peter, as an aside, note that cairo_pdf embeds the fonts by default.
Best,
Iñaki
On Mon, 11 Mar 2024 at 15:31, <pstils using gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Martin and Tim,
>
> I also have this bug. Though I think not necessarily with all the same
> fonts as Martin.
>
> Using Martin's code:
>
> https://imgur.com/a/ILUoe3H
>
> Fedora 39, Evince 45.0
>
> It's a bug with Evince. I think. I think it's substituting in a font
> set that doesn't have all the required symbols. I think it should be
> possible to install the required fonts, but I haven't found a solution
> that way, yet.
>
> Nevertheless, the following should work, and may be a better solution
> anyway, given that embedding the fonts is probably more cross-
> platform/viewer friendly:
>
>
> You can embed the fonts if you have Ghostscript installed (I think it
> comes with Fedora already(?) if not then:
>
> sudo dnf install ghostscript
>
> )
>
>
> You can then use the embedFonts() function in R:
>
> (pdfil <- paste0("plotmath-example_R",
> with(R.version, paste0(major, sub("[.]", "", minor))),
> ".pdf"))
>
> pdf(pdfil)
> example(plotmath); mtext(R.version.string)
> dev.off()
>
> # Use embedFonts to embed the fonts in the PDF
> embedFonts(file = pdfil, outfile = paste0("embedded-example", pdfil),
> options = "-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress")
>
>
> if(interactive()) {
> system(paste("evince", paste0("embedded-example", pdfil), "&"))
> }
>
>
>
> Or you can do it in the terminal:
>
>
> gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -
> dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=plotmath-example-output_embedded.pdf -
> f plotmath-example_R432.pdf
>
>
> Compare:
>
>
> Embedded:
>
> ❯ pdffonts plotmath-example-output_embedded.pdf
> name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
> ---------------------- -------- -------- --- --- --- ------ ---
> KHEPSB+Helvetica Type 1C Custom yes yes no 10 0
> WNPVSJ+Symbol Type 1C Custom yes yes no 12 0
> MQBKOK+Helvetica-Bold Type 1C WinAnsi yes yes no 20 0
>
>
> Original:
>
> ❯ pdffonts plotmath-example_R432.pdf
> name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
> ---------------------- -------- -------- --- --- --- ------ ---
> Helvetica Type 1 Custom no no no 16 0
> Helvetica-Bold Type 1 Custom no no no 17 0
> Symbol Type 1 Symbol no no no 18 0
>
>
> I hope this works for you. Like I said, I *think* it's a problem with
> Evince so it's probably better to file a bug report with them, but I
> also think embedding fonts isn't such a bad idea anyway - you'll know
> the output will display as intended regardless of the viewer on the
> user's system. It does lead to a larger file-size, but I think these
> days we can live with that.
>
> Thanks,
> Peter
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2024-03-11 at 14:15 +0100, 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
> > >>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
> > >> R-SIG-Fedora using r-project.org
> > >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
> > >>
> >
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> >
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--
Iñaki Úcar
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