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https://github.com/yixuan/showtext

Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs
https://github.com/yixuan/showtext

font graphics graphics-device r-graphics

Last synced: 17 days ago
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Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs

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README 

        
## showtextshowtext



### What's this package all about?



**showtext** makes it easy to use various types of fonts (TrueType, OpenType,

Type 1, web fonts, etc.) in R plots. The motivation to develop this package

is that using non-standard fonts in R plots (especially for PDF device)

is not straightforward, for example, when creating PDF with Chinese characters.

This is because most of the standard fonts used by `pdf()` do not contain

Chinese character glyphs, and users could hardly use system fonts in R.



The [extrafont](https://github.com/wch/extrafont) package developed by

[Winston Chang](https://github.com/wch) is one nice solution to this problem,

which mainly focuses on using TrueType fonts (`.ttf`) in PDF graphics device.

Now **showtext** is able to support more font formats and more graphics devices,

and avoids using external software such as Ghostscript.



### A quick example



```r

library(showtext)

## Loading Google fonts (https://fonts.google.com/)

font_add_google("Gochi Hand", "gochi")

font_add_google("Schoolbell", "bell")

font_add_google("Covered By Your Grace", "grace")

font_add_google("Rock Salt", "rock")



## Automatically use showtext to render text for future devices

showtext_auto()



## Tell showtext the resolution of the device,

## only needed for bitmap graphics. Default is 96

showtext_opts(dpi = 96)



set.seed(123)

x = rnorm(10)

y = 1 + x + rnorm(10, sd = 0.2)

y[1] = 5

mod = lm(y ~ x)



op = par(cex.lab = 2, cex.axis = 1.5, cex.main = 2)

plot(x, y, pch = 16, col = "steelblue",

     xlab = "X variable", ylab = "Y variable", family = "gochi")

grid()

title("Draw Plots Before You Fit A Regression", family = "bell")

text(-0.5, 4.5, "This is the outlier", cex = 2, col = "steelblue",

     family = "grace")

abline(coef(mod))

abline(1, 1, col = "red")

par(family = "rock")

text(1, 1, expression(paste("True model: ", y == x + 1)),

     cex = 1.5, col = "red", srt = 20)

text(0, 2, expression(paste("OLS: ", hat(y) == 0.79 * x + 1.49)),

     cex = 1.5, srt = 15)

legend("topright", legend = c("Truth", "OLS"), col = c("red", "black"), lty = 1)



par(op)

```





  quick_example




In this example we first load some fonts that are available online

through [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/), and then tell R

to render text using **showtext** by calling the `showtext_auto()`

function. All the remaining part is exactly the same as the usual plotting

commands.



This example should work on most graphics devices, including `pdf()`,

`png()`, `postscript()`, and on-screen devices such as `windows()` on

Windows and `x11()` on Linux.



### How **showtext** works



Let me first explain a little bit how `pdf()` works.



To my best knowledge, the default PDF device in R does not "draw" the text,

but actually "describes" the text in the PDF file.

That is to say, instead of drawing lines and curves of the actual glyph,

it only embeds information about the text, for example what characters

it has, which font it uses, etc.



However, the text with declared font may be displayed differently in

different OS, which means that the appearance of graph created by `pdf()` is

system dependent. If you unfortunately do not have the declared font

in your system, you may not be able to see the text correctly at all. 



In comparison, **showtext** package tries to solve this problem by

converting text into color-filled polygonal outlines (for vector graphics)

or raster images (for bitmap and on-screen graphics), thus having the

same appearance under all platforms. People who view this graph do not

need to install the font that creates the graph. It provides convenience to

both graph makers and graph viewers.



More importantly, **showtext** can use system font files, so you can

show text in the graph with your favourite font face, as long as it

is supported by FreeType. See section **Loading fonts** below.



### The usage



To create a graph using a specified font, you simply do the following:



- (\*) Load the font to be used by **showtext**

- Open the graphics device

- (\*) Claim that you want to use **showtext** to draw the text

- Plot

- Close the device



Only the steps marked with (\*) are new. If you want to use

**showtext** globally, you can call the function `showtext_auto()`

once, and then all the devices after that will automatically use

**showtext** to render text, as the example in the beginning shows.



If you want to have finer control on which part of the code should use

**showtext**, functions `showtext_begin()` and `showtext_end()` will help.

Only plotting functions enclosed by this pair of calls will use **showtext**,

and others not. For example, to change the title font only, we can do:



```r

library(showtext)

font_add_google("Schoolbell", "bell")



## By default the automatic call of showtext is disabled

## You can manually turn it off using the line below

## showtext_auto(enable = FALSE)



## To use showtext_begin() and showtext_end() you need to

## explicitly open a graphics device

png("demo.png", 700, 600, res = 96)

set.seed(123)

x = rnorm(10)

y = 1 + x + rnorm(10, sd = 0.2)

y[1] = 5

mod = lm(y ~ x)



op = par(cex.lab = 1.5, cex.axis = 1.5, cex.main = 2)

plot(x, y, pch = 16, col = "steelblue",

     xlab = "X variable", ylab = "Y variable")

grid()



## Use showtext only for this part

showtext_begin()

title("Draw Plots Before You Fit A Regression", family = "bell")

showtext_end()



text(-0.5, 4.5, "This is the outlier", cex = 2, col = "steelblue")

abline(coef(mod))

abline(1, 1, col = "red")

text(1, 1, expression(paste("True model: ", y == x + 1)),

     cex = 1.5, col = "red", srt = 20)

text(0, 2, expression(paste("OLS: ", hat(y) == 0.79 * x + 1.49)),

     cex = 1.5, srt = 15)

legend("topright", legend = c("Truth", "OLS"), col = c("red", "black"), lty = 1)



par(op)

dev.off()

```





  demo-2




### Loading fonts



Loading font is actually done by package **sysfonts**.



The easy way to load font into **showtext** is by calling `font_add(family, regular)`,

where `family` is the name that you assign to that font (so that later you can

call `par(family = ...)` to use this font in plotting), and `regular` is the

path to the font file. That is to say, only knowing the "font name" is not

enough, since they are usually system dependent. On the contrary, font file

is the entity that actually provides the character glyphs.



Usually the font files are located in some "standard" directories in the system 

(for example on Windows it is typically `C:\Windows\Fonts`).

You can use `font_paths()` to check the current search path or add a new one,

and use `font_files()` to list available font files in the search path.

`font_files()` also lists some other useful information, for example the family

name that you usually use to specify a font, and the font face for different

variants. Below is an example to show the results on my machine:



```r

head(font_files())



##                     path                           file               family

## 1 ***/.local/share/fonts            Flavors-Regular.ttf              Flavors

## 2 ***/.local/share/fonts FrederickatheGreat-Regular.ttf Fredericka the Great

## 3 ***/.local/share/fonts           GandhiSerif-Bold.otf         Gandhi Serif

## 4 ***/.local/share/fonts     GandhiSerif-BoldItalic.otf         Gandhi Serif

## 5 ***/.local/share/fonts         GandhiSerif-Italic.otf         Gandhi Serif

## 6 ***/.local/share/fonts        GandhiSerif-Regular.otf         Gandhi Serif

##

##          face       version                    ps_name

## 1     Regular Version 1.001            Flavors-Regular

## 2     Regular Version 1.001 FrederickatheGreat-Regular

## 3        Bold Version 1.001           GandhiSerif-Bold

## 4 Bold Italic Version 1.001     GandhiSerif-BoldItalic

## 5      Italic Version 1.001         GandhiSerif-Italic

## 6     Regular Version 1.001        GandhiSerif-Regular

```



And the code below demonstrates how to load and use system fonts on Windows:



```r

library(showtext)

## Add fonts that are available on Windows

font_add("heiti", "simhei.ttf")

font_add("constan", "constan.ttf", italic = "constani.ttf")



library(ggplot2)

p = ggplot(NULL, aes(x = 1, y = 1)) + ylim(0.8, 1.2) +

    theme(axis.title = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank(),

          axis.text = element_blank()) +

    annotate("text", 1, 1.1, family = "heiti", size = 15,

             label = "\u4F60\u597D\uFF0C\u4E16\u754C") +

    annotate("text", 1, 0.9, label = 'Chinese for "Hello, world!"',

             family = "constan", fontface = "italic", size = 12)



## Automatically use showtext for new devices

showtext_auto()



## On-screen device

x11()

print(p)

dev.off()



## PDF device

pdf("showtext-example-3.pdf", 7, 4)

print(p)

dev.off()



## PNG device

ggsave("showtext-example-4.png", width = 7, height = 4, dpi = 96)



## Turn off if no longer needed

showtext_auto(FALSE)

```





  example1




For other OS, you may not have the `simhei.ttf` font file, but there is no

difficulty in using something else. At present `font_add()` supports TrueType

fonts(\*.ttf/\*.ttc) and OpenType fonts(\*.otf), and adding new

font type is trivial as long as FreeType supports it.



Also, there are many free fonts available and accessible on the web, for instance

the Google Fonts project ([https://fonts.google.com/](https://fonts.google.com/)).

**sysfonts** provides an interface to automatically download and register those fonts

through the function `font_add_google()`, as the example below shows.



```r

library(showtext)

font_add_google("Lobster", "lobster")



showtext_auto()



plot(1, pch = 16, cex = 3)

text(1, 1.1, "A fancy dot", family = "lobster", col = "steelblue", cex = 3)

```





  example2




### CJK fonts



**showtext** includes an open source CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) font

[WenQuanYi Micro Hei](http://wenq.org/wqy2/index.cgi?MicroHei%28en%29).

If you just want to show CJK text in your graph, simply specify the `wqy-microhei`

family name in plotting functions.



Another option is to install the

[Source Han Sans](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-sans)/[Serif](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif)

fonts locally using the following code:



```r

library(showtext)

font_install(source_han_serif())

font_families()

## [1] "sans"                "serif"               "mono"                "wqy-microhei"       

## [5] "source-han-serif-cn"

```



See `?font_install` and `?source_han` for more details.





  source han




### The internals of **showtext**



Every graphics device in R implements some functions to draw specific graphical

elements, e.g., `path()` and `polygon()` to draw polygons, `raster()` to display

bitmap images, `text()` or `textUTF8()` to show text, etc. What `showtext` does

is to override their own text rendering functions and replace them by hooks

provided in **showtext** that will further call the device's `path()` or `raster()`

functions to draw the character glyphs.



This action is done only when you call `showtext_begin()` and won't modify the

graphics device if you call `showtext_end()` to restore the original device functions back.



### Compatibility with RStudio



Starting from version 0.9, **showtext** can work well with the RStudio graphics

device (RStudioGD). Simply call `showtext_auto()` in the RStudio session and then

the plots will be displayed correctly.