[R-SIG-Mac] quartz fonts issue, ever resolved?

[Byron Ellis]

Actually, I do have an answer. I just apparently forgot to write a
post on the subject. :-)

The problem is twofold. The first is that you don't have Arial on your
system and the hard coded fallback font is Arial (according to a note
I left to myself a problem with italics in Helvetica on 10.4 prompted
the decision).

The bigger problem is why you're falling back to that at all--it
should be a very rare occurrence. The problem looks to be that
par()$family is NULL by default which the font lookup code switches to
"default". Of course, when you look at "quartzFonts()" you'll notice
that it only includes valid values for par()$family which are "mono,"
"sans" or "serif." (Courier, Helvetica and Times-Roman respectively by
default).

A quick workaround is par(family="mono").

In the longer term, there appears to be a bug in the way
quartz.options()$family is used (it isn't as far as I can tell) that
I'm going to fix and write a patch for (probably falling back to that
before falling back to Arial).


On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Simon Jackman <jackman at stanford.edu> wrote:
> I saw some traffic on this list last month
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2009-December/006921.html
>
> re the warnings
>
> no font could be found for family "Arial"
>
> when using a quartz device.  Was this ever resolved?  I'm getting the same behavior with 2.10 (and later) but *not* when using the Urbanek/Iacus GUI (1.32 5546 Leopard).   R from a terminal window (or ESS) produces the "text-less" graphs and warnings when using a quartz device; see the output below.  Thanks in advance for any guidance.
>
> Simon Jackman, Depts of Political Science & (by courtesy) Statistics,
> Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044, USA.
> http://jackman.stanford.edu
>
>> system("uname -v")
> Darwin Kernel Version 10.2.0: Tue Nov  3 10:37:10 PST 2009; root:xnu-1486.2.11~1/RELEASE_I386
>> version
>               _
> platform       x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0
> arch           x86_64
> os             darwin9.8.0
> system         x86_64, darwin9.8.0
> status         Patched
> major          2
> minor          10.1
> year           2010
> month          01
> day            06
> svn rev        50921
> language       R
> version.string R version 2.10.1 Patched (2010-01-06 r50921)
>> plot(1:10)
> There were 17 warnings (use warnings() to see them)
>> warnings()
> Warning messages:
> 1: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 2: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 3: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 4: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 5: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 6: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 7: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 8: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 9: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 10: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 11: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 12: In axis(side = side, at = at, labels = labels, ...) :
>  no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 13: In title(...) : no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 14: In title(...) : no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 15: In title(...) : no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 16: In title(...) : no font could be found for family "Arial"
> 17: In title(...) : no font could be found for family "Arial"
>> quartz.options()
> $title
> [1] "Quartz %d"
>
> $width
> [1] 7
>
> $height
> [1] 7
>
> $pointsize
> [1] 12
>
> $family
> [1] "Helvetica"
>
> $fontsmooth
> [1] TRUE
>
> $antialias
> [1] TRUE
>
> $type
> [1] "native"
>
> $bg
> [1] "transparent"
>
> $canvas
> [1] "white"
>
> $dpi
> [1] NA
>
>
>
>
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Byron Ellis (byron.ellis at gmail.com)
"Oook" -- The Librarian