I found the problem with the Arial font.

Apparently this is due to a conflict between the Arial font installed by MS
Entourage (argh!) and the default Arial in Snow leopard. The MS version
installed in /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
is not compatible with Snow and shows as blank font. Unfortunately it seems
to take priority to the default Snow Arial and is not visible in font book.

Deleting Arial from /Library/Fonts/Microsoft fixed the problem for me.

I found this because Entourage was having the same trouble displaying html
mail with Arial and this pointed me in the right direction.

Thanks,
gommo.

PS: I don't seem to find my messages in the r-sig-mac archives... any
problem there?

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Gommo Skipper <gommoskipper@gmail.com>wrote:

> Simon,
> thank you for the quick reply. Indeed, seems you've nailed the problem.
>
> This has the problem:
> > hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO",family="Arial")
>
> Helvetica instead works properly:
> > hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO",family="Helvetica")
>
> My quartz.options() shows:
> $family
> [1] "Helvetica"
>
> If I open a new quartz with par(family="Helvetica"), I can use both
>
> hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO")
> hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO",family="<whatever>")
>
> But family="Arial" shows empty labels.
>
> This might seem a stupid question, but:
>  1. How do I change the default font family for quartz?
> 2. How do I check if Arial family is disabled (it is installed in my Mac
> and I can use the font in other programs).
>
> I don't really need "Arial", but I can't seem to find the correct way to
> specity a different default family (par("mono") opens a new quartz window
> and
>
> Thank you.
> Gommo
>
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Simon Urbanek <
> simon.urbanek@r-project.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 31, 2010, at 10:31 AM, Gommo Skipper wrote:
>>
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > I'm trying to use the mac port of R and have problem seeing any label in
>> my
>> > plots. There's no main title, labels and no errors spitting from the R
>> > console.
>> >
>> >> sessionInfo()
>> > I'm trying to use quartz on a x64 snow leopard:
>> >
>> > R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
>> > x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0
>> >
>> > locale:
>> > [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>> >
>> > attached base packages:
>> > [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>> >> hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO")
>> >>
>> >
>> > This is a stock installation, and I'm out of ideas on how to fix it.
>> > Any hints?
>> >
>>
>> I cannot reproduce it, but this sounds like a font issue. Have you
>> disabled some fonts (such as Arial) on your system? (see the recent
>> discussion on this) Try using some font that you have on your system, e.g.
>> hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO",family="Monaco")
>> or
>> hist(rnorm(100),main="HELLO",family="Helvetica")
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Simon
>
>
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

