Specifying fonts

System font aliases

system_fonts takes a named list of font families as argument. The names typically correspond to standard R faces but they can also alias non-standard families (though this is less useful):

fonts <- list(
  sans = "Helvetica",
  mono = "Consolas",
  `Times New Roman` = "DejaVu Serif"
)

ss <- svgstring(system_fonts = fonts)
plot(1:10)
text(0.8, 0.8, "Some text", family = "mono")
text(0.2, 0.2, "Other text", family = "Times New Roman")
dev.off()
ss()

If you need support for non-latin characters, choose fonts with good Unicode coverage. “Arial Unicode MS” is a sans serif font with good coverage that is available on macOS and Windows systems (on the latter, only if MS Office is installed). Note that this font does not support kerning and has no bold or italic faces.

svglite("Rplots.svg", system_fonts = list(sans = "Arial Unicode MS"))
plot.new()
text(0.5, 0.5, "正規分布")
dev.off()

The Noto fontset provided by Google as well as the Han Sans family by Adobe have excellent coverage but may not be available at the time of rendering. This can be a concern if you distribute the SVG files on the Internet.

User font aliases

In addition to system fonts, you can also provide fonts that are not necessarily installed on the system (i.e., fonts that live in user space). The main reason to do this is to generate reproducible SVG files as different platforms can have different versions of a font and thus produce different text metrics. The user_fonts arguments takes either paths to font files, fonts from the fontquiver package, or a list that specifies the alias. Whereas system_fonts gets a named list of families as argument, user_fonts takes a named tree of lists of families (sans, serif, mono and symbol) and faces (plain, italic, bold, bolditalic, symbol):

# Using ttf files from fontquiver here, but it could be any ttf
some_file <- fontquiver::font("Liberation", "Sans", "Regular")$ttf
other_file <- fontquiver::font("Liberation", "Sans", "Italic")$ttf
serif_file <- fontquiver::font("Liberation", "serif", "Italic")$ttf

# The outer named list contains families while the inner named list
# contains faces:
fonts <- list(
  sans = list(
    plain = some_file,
    italic = other_file
  ),
  serif = list(plain = serif_file)
)

ss <- svglite("plot.svg", user_fonts = fonts)
plot.new()
text(0.5, 0.5, "Sans Plain text")
text(0.2, 0.2, "Sans Italic text", font = 3)
text(0.8, 0.8, "Serif text", family = "serif")
dev.off()

You can also control which font gets written in the font-family fields of SVGs by supplying a list containing alias and file elements:

file_with_alias <- list(alias = "Foobar Font", file = other_file)
fonts <- list(sans = list(plain = file_with_alias))

ss <- svgstring(user_fonts = fonts)
plot(1:10)
text(0.5, 0.5, "Sans text")
dev.off()
ss()

fontquiver fonts are particularly useful for creating reproducible SVG files. The vdiffr package uses svglite with fontquiver fonts to create visual unit tests reliably across platforms. The Liberation fontset is appropriate for this usage because it features all 12 combinations of standard R families and faces. In addition fontquiver provides Symbola for the symbol font. The function fontquiver::font_families() produces a list with the appropriate structure and can be directly supplied to svglite:

fonts <- fontquiver::font_families("Liberation")
fonts$symbol$symbol <- fontquiver::font_symbol("Symbola")
str(fonts, 2)

svglite("reproducible.svg", user_fonts = fonts)
plot(1:10)
dev.off()

Debugging font matching

The systemfonts package is used to match font family names to fonts installed on the system. systemfonts will always return a valid font, but if the requested font is badly misspelled or missing, a default will be returned. To test if the expected font is matched you can use the match_font() and font_info() functions from systemfonts:

systemfonts::match_font("Helvetica")
#> $path
#> [1] "/System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.ttc"
#> 
#> $index
#> [1] 0
#> 
#> $features
#> NULL
systemfonts::font_info("Helvetica", bold = TRUE)
#>                                  path index    family style italic bold
#> 1 /System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.ttc     1 Helvetica  Bold  FALSE TRUE
#>   monospace weight  width kerning color scalable vertical n_glyphs n_sizes
#> 1     FALSE   bold normal   FALSE FALSE     TRUE    FALSE     2252       0
#>   n_charmaps                                        bbox max_ascend max_descend
#> 1         10 -12.218750, 16.468750, -5.765625, 11.546875   9.234375   -2.765625
#>   max_advance_width max_advance_height lineheight underline_pos underline_size
#> 1                18                 12         12     -1.203125        0.59375