Font Families for the R PDF Device

Yihui Xie

12 years ago

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Motivated by the excellent R package pgfSweave, I begin to notice the families in my graphs when writing Sweave documents. The default family for PDF graphs is Helvetica, which is, in most cases (I think), inconsistent with the LaTeX styles. Some common families are listed in ?postscript, and we can take a look at them by:

for (f in c("AvantGarde", "Bookman", "Courier", "Helvetica",
    "Helvetica-Narrow", "NewCenturySchoolbook", "Palatino", "Times")) {
    pdf.options(family = f)
    pdf(paste(f, ".pdf", sep = ""))
    set.seed(123)
    plot(rnorm(25), pch = 1:25, xlab = "xlab family", ylab = "ylab ",
        main = paste("Font Families in R (PDF):", f))
    text(13, 0, "Text in the Middle")
    mtext(sprintf("pdf.options(family = \"%s\")", f), side = 4)
    dev.off()
}

Here is a merged PDF containing the above single PDF files:

R-PDF–families.pdf (29K)

It seems that "Bookman", "NewCenturySchoolbook", "Palatino" and "Times" can be better choices when using Sweave because they are serif s, which are usually more consistent with LaTeX PDF.

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