HI Iñaki,
That's interesting.
I may be wrong but I think it's the Symbol font that's got the
substitution bug, not Helvetica.
❯ fc-match "Symbol"
StandardSymbolsPS.t1: "Standard Symbols PS" "Regular"
Is what I get, but then in the Evince properties it's telling me that
it's substituting Symbol with "Noto Sans Regular", despite the Standard
Symbols PS font being installed.
When I make a ~/.font.config file (I didn't have one already) with the
contents:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="pattern">
<test name="family" qual="any" >
<string>Symbol</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same">
<string>OpenSymbol</string>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
(OpenSymbol is in libreoffice-opensymbol-fonts)
Then evince shows me the symbols. (Whether they're the correct ones or
not, I don't know! They look right to me, but I'm a biologist, so...).
And now:
❯ fc-match "Symbol"
opens___.ttf: "OpenSymbol" "Regular"
So, I think that's another option for you, Martin. But I think
embedding might still be the better choice, anyway.
I now don't think the bug is with Evince. I suspect something's telling
Evince (and Okular) to use the wrong font, but you can force a more
appropriate substitution.
Do you think it could be this?:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2088665
Thanks,
Peter
On Mon, 2024-03-11 at 18:59 +0100, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
> Martin, I wouldn't rule out an R issue yet. Fonts are... tricky. So
> I'm cc'ing Paul Murrell here.
>
> I tried several viewers here and I see the following: Chrome, Firefox
> and Libreoffice Draw show the symbols; however, evince, okular and
> xournal++ agree on **not** showing the symbols. **If** there is a
> bug, the bug would be in fontconfig, because these ones AFAIK
> properly delegate on fontconfig, which is the system-wide component
> that decides what font substitution should be made for any given
> font. However, I see:
>
> $ fc-match Helvetica
> NimbusSans-Regular.otf: "Nimbus Sans" "Regular"
>
> which is the right choice. And okular confirms this by showing in a
> properties dialog that it is substituting Helvetica with URW's Nimbus
> Sans Regular. So why aren't the symbols displayed? My best guess is
> that this has something to do with how R encodes such symbols. Paul
> introduced some changes to fix similar issues for Cairo devices when
> Fedora dropped support for Type 1 fonts, see [1]. Now, I'm no font
> expert, but it seems to me that the pdf device may require similar
> fixes. (And why do xpdf or Firefox show the glyphs... I have no idea.
> I guess they do their thing without asking fontconfig).
>
> [1] https://blog.r-project.org/2020/04/17/changes-to-symbol-fonts-
> for-cairo-graphics-devices/
>
> Peter, as an aside, note that cairo_pdf embeds the fonts by default.
>
> Best,
> Iñaki
>
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2024 at 15:31, <pst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Martin and Tim,
> >
> > I also have this bug. Though I think not necessarily with all the
> > same
> > fonts as Martin.
> >
> > Using Martin's code:
> >
> > https://imgur.com/a/ILUoe3H
> >
> > Fedora 39, Evince 45.0
> >
> > It's a bug with Evince. I think. I think it's substituting in a
> > font
> > set that doesn't have all the required symbols. I think it should
> > be
> > possible to install the required fonts, but I haven't found a
> > solution
> > that way, yet.
> >
> > Nevertheless, the following should work, and may be a better
> > solution
> > anyway, given that embedding the fonts is probably more cross-
> > platform/viewer friendly:
> >
> >
> > You can embed the fonts if you have Ghostscript installed (I think
> > it
> > comes with Fedora already(?) if not then:
> >
> > sudo dnf install ghostscript
> >
> > )
> >
> >
> > You can then use the embedFonts() function in R:
> >
> > (pdfil <- paste0("plotmath-example_R",
> > with(R.version, paste0(major, sub("[.]", "",
> > minor))),
> > ".pdf"))
> >
> > pdf(pdfil)
> > example(plotmath); mtext(R.version.string)
> > dev.off()
> >
> > # Use embedFonts to embed the fonts in the PDF
> > embedFonts(file = pdfil, outfile = paste0("embedded-example",
> > pdfil),
> > options = "-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress")
> >
> >
> > if(interactive()) {
> > system(paste("evince", paste0("embedded-example", pdfil), "&"))
> > }
> >
> >
> >
> > Or you can do it in the terminal:
> >
> >
> > gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -
> > dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=plotmath-example-
> > output_embedded.pdf -
> > f plotmath-example_R432.pdf
> >
> >
> > Compare:
> >
> >
> > Embedded:
> >
> > ❯ pdffonts plotmath-example-output_embedded.pdf
> > name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
> > ---------------------- -------- -------- --- --- --- ------ ---
> > KHEPSB+Helvetica Type 1C Custom yes yes no 10 0
> > WNPVSJ+Symbol Type 1C Custom yes yes no 12 0
> > MQBKOK+Helvetica-Bold Type 1C WinAnsi yes yes no 20 0
> >
> >
> > Original:
> >
> > ❯ pdffonts plotmath-example_R432.pdf
> > name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
> > ---------------------- -------- -------- --- --- --- ------ ---
> > Helvetica Type 1 Custom no no no 16 0
> > Helvetica-Bold Type 1 Custom no no no 17 0
> > Symbol Type 1 Symbol no no no 18 0
> >
> >
> > I hope this works for you. Like I said, I *think* it's a problem
> > with
> > Evince so it's probably better to file a bug report with them, but
> > I
> > also think embedding fonts isn't such a bad idea anyway - you'll
> > know
> > the output will display as intended regardless of the viewer on the
> > user's system. It does lead to a larger file-size, but I think
> > these
> > days we can live with that.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Peter
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 2024-03-11 at 14:15 +0100, Martin Maechler wrote:
> > > > > > > > Tim Taylor
> > > > > > > > on Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:42:35 +0000 writes:
> > >
> > > > Hi Martin
> > > > Probably not the answer you're looking for but on the
> > > latest
> > > Fedora 39 (workstation edition) both locally, and on a freshly
> > > installed VM (with just R-core installed), all fonts render
> > > correctly
> > > for me in evince.
> > >
> > > > $ evince --version
> > > > GNOME Document Viewer 45.0
> > >
> > > > $ R --version
> > > > R version 4.3.3 (2024-02-29) -- "Angel Food Cake"
> > > > Copyright (C) 2024 The R Foundation for Statistical
> > > Computing
> > > > Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> > >
> > > > It may be worth sharing more details about your
> > > installation
> > > (e.g. Fedora version) to see if anyone has any ideas.
> > >
> > > > Tim
> > >
> > > Thank you, Tim.
> > >
> > >
> > > Fedora is 38 :
> > >
> > > $ lsb_release -a
> > > LSB Version: :core-5.0-amd64:core-5.0-noarch:cxx-5.0-amd64:cxx-
> > > 5.0-noarch:desktop-5.0-amd64:desktop-5.0-noarch:languages-5.0-
> > > amd64:languages-5.0-noarch:printing-5.0-amd64:printing-5.0-noarch
> > > Distributor ID: Fedora
> > > Description: Fedora release 38 (Thirty Eight)
> > > Release: 38
> > > Codename: ThirtyEight
> > >
> > > $ evince --version
> > > GNOME Document Viewer 44.3
> > >
> > > R version does not matter at all.
> > > Same phenomenon in several versions of R I have installed
> > > simultaneously (from source).
> > > As I mentioned, I'm slightly misusing the list for non-R problem
> > > that I encounter a lot with R {because I like to use
> > > "plotmath"}, so I apologize in advance.
> > >
> > > Maybe it's rather a matter of fonts installed in
> > > /usr/share/fonts/ ??
> > >
> > > Martin
> > >
> > > > On Mon, 11 Mar 2024, at 10:51 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
> > > >> This problem has bugged me for several years now,
> > > >> and our own IT staff has tried a few things, but then
> > > never
> > > >> cared enough to persist fixing it.
> > > >>
> > > >> It *is* a bug in evince, the standard pdf viewer on Fedora
> > > and
> > > >> IIUC also quite few other Linux distributions, and
> > > >> *not* a bug in R; hence I am asking for help/hints here.
> > > >>
> > > >> A very simple example:
> > > >>
> > > >> ----------------------------------------------------------
> > > ----
> > > -----------------
> > > >>
> > > >> (pdfil <- paste0("plotmath-example_R",
> > > >> with(R.version, paste0(major, sub("[.]", "", minor))),
> > > ".pdf"))
> > > >> ## "plomath-example_R433.pdf"
> > > >>
> > > >> pdf(pdfil)
> > > >> example(plotmath); mtext(R.version.string)
> > > >> dev.off()
> > > >>
> > > >> if(interactive())
> > > >> system(paste("evince", pdfil, "&"))
> > > >>
> > > >> ----------------------------------------------------------
> > > ----
> > > -----------------
> > > >>
> > > >> The pdf contains 4 pages, and in all of them *some* of the
> > > math
> > > >> symbols are replaced by open rectangles -- because evince
> > > does
> > > >> not find the fonts it should.
> > > >>
> > > >> E.g.
> > > >> - page 1: \pi is properly shown, \phi not
> > > >> - page 2: all greek letters, \theta, \xi, \eta are *not*
> > > shown
> > > >> ...
> > > >>
> > > >> Simply typing
> > > >>
> > > >> example(plotmath)
> > > >>
> > > >> in the R console will show you everything as it should be
> > > but
> > > is
> > > >> not for us, using evince.
> > > >>
> > > >> However, *everything* is rendered correctly, if I use very
> > > old
> > > >> 'xpdf' {which you may have to install
> > > >>
> > > >> ## OTOH: This always work fine with the very old 'xpdf' :
> > > >> system(paste("xpdf", pdfil, "&"))
> > > >>
> > > >> So the fonts *are* somewhere on my machine, but evince
> > > does
> > > not
> > > >> find them;
> > > >>
> > > >> How should our IT people fix this?
> > > >>
> > > >> IIRC they did install the Zapf Dingbats fonts -- which
> > > then
> > > are
> > > >> found by xpdf but not by evince ?
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >> Thank you in advance,
> > > >> Martin
> > > >>
> > > >> _______________________________________________
> > > >> R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
> > > >> R-SIG-Fedora@r-project.org
> > > >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
> > > >>
> > >
> > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
> > > R-SIG-Fedora@r-project.org
> > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
> > R-SIG-Fedora@r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
>
>
> --
> Iñaki Úcar
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