On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 03:32, Paul Murrell <p...@stat.auckland.ac.nz> wrote: > > I think R will retain the idea of a separate symbol font in at least the > short term because of backward compatibility and cross-platform support > and support for a range of graphics devices. So this fix is just for > cairo-based devices on Linux at most (probably only Fedora). > > So this becomes just a decision about user interface and default settings. > > I did consider the option of allowing the existing "family" parameter to > be length-two (with the second one being an optional symbol font > specification), but because of the overlaps of X11/cairo and different > cairo-based device interfaces, this became awkward. Hence the separate > "symbolfamily" interface. And in any case, this still means a separate > "symbol" font specification (for the reasons above). > > Regarding changing to a default symbolfamily=family on Linux generally > (rather than just on Fedora), I have at least one counter-example (my > Ubuntu 18.04) that shows that this would degrade output significantly. > For one, the symbols are a LOT uglier, plus there are some incorrect > glyphs. So I think we have to stay with treating Fedora as a special > case for now.
You can try Noto Sans Symbols (google-noto-sans-symbols-fonts) or Symbola (gdouros-symbola-fonts). We could make the R package depend on any of these fonts included in Fedora. > Thanks for your point about just using symbolfamily=family as the Fedora > default. That seems reasonable (and definitely better than it just > being completely broken!). > > That does still leave the problem of how to set the default value for > "symbolfamily" JUST on Fedora. I am not convinced we can use R code to > detect Fedora >= 30 reliably (but happy to learn otherwise). Is it a > possibility for the Fedora distribution to include a .Rprofile.site file > that sets the X11.options() ? 1. I don't think you need to detect you are in Fedora at all, just to detect the version of pango, and apply this configuration if it's >= 1.44 (e.g., by executing pango-view --version; or better yet, at building time https://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Version-Checking.html). 2. Yes, we can include any custom configuration files or patches. In fact we will need to patch R 3.6.3 for Fedora 31 at least, because Fedora 32 is about to be released, and thus R 4.0.0 won't be included in Fedora 31. The problem with the .Rprofile.site is that any user-specific .Rprofile will prevent the default from being loaded, right? And I'd say ~/.Rprofile is pretty common out there, and even project-specific .Rprofile. -- Iñaki Úcar ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel