Using system and web fonts in R plots

The forthcoming R Journal has an interesting article on the showtext package by Yixuan Qiu. The package allows me to use system and web s directly in R plots, reminding me a little of the approach taken by XeLaTeX. But “unlike other methods to embed s into graphics, showtext converts text into raster images or polygons, and then adds them to the plot canvas. This method produces platform-independent image files that do not rely on the s that create them.” [1]

Here is an example with s from my local system:

library(showtext)
png("System-Fonts.png", width=550, height=350);
par(mfrow=c(2,2))
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Lucida Bright", family = "Lucida Bright")
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Courier", family = "Courier")
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Helvetica Neue Light", family = "Helvetica Neue Light") 
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Lucida Handwriting Italic", family = "Lucida Handwriting Italic")
dev.off()

Additionally showtext allows me to use s hosted online, e.g. Google web s:

.add.google("Alegreya Sans", "aleg");
.add.google("Permanent Marker", "marker")
.add.google("Gruppo", "gruppo")
.add.google("Lobster", "lobster")
png("Google-Fonts.png", width=550, height=350)
showtext.begin()
par(mfrow=c(2,2))
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Alegreya Sans", family = "aleg")
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Permanent Marker", family = "marker")
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Gruppo", family = "gruppo") 
plot(1 ~ 1, main="Lobster", family = "lobster") 
showtext.end()
dev.off()

For more information read the article and/or visit the project site.

References

[1] Yixuan Qiu. showtext: Using System Fonts in R Graphics. The R Journal, 7(1), 2015.

Session Info

R version 3.2.0 (2015-04-16)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base     

other attached packages:
[1] showtext_0.4-2 syss_0.5  

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RCurl_1.95-4.6 showtextdb_1.0 jsonlite_0.9.16 bitops_1.0-6