[Rd] Plotmath on Fedora 31 broken with with pango >= 1.44 - workarounds?

[Iñaki Ucar]

Thanks, Paul. I've created a bug report to keep track of this
(https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17748), and taken
the liberty of adding you to CC. We'll need to cherry-pick the fix for
R 3.6.3 in Fedora 31.

Iñaki

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 at 21:15, Paul Murrell <paul using stat.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Thanks for your input on this Iñaki and Nicolas.
>
> I am starting testing an R fix for this problem today.
>
> As suggested, the plan is to allow the R user to specify a font family
> other than "symbol" for plotmath output (or, more generally, in R
> parlance, for 'font=5' or 'fontface=5') on a Cairo-based graphics device.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 27/03/20 11:30 pm, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
> > On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 at 12:25, Nicolas Mailhot
> > <nicolas.mailhot using laposte.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> <snip>
> >>
> >> R brought this all on itself by hardcoding a Windows-only “Symbol” font
> >> family name in its default conf. Linux systems are UTF-8 by default for
> >> ~20 years now, they don’t need the forcing of magic font families to
> >> handle symbols not present in the 8-bit legacy Windows encodings.
> >>
> >> The actual effect of this conf is not the selection of font files with
> >> special and unusual symbols. It is to priorize fonts that match the
> >> "Symbol" magic name. And those fonts are few and crumbling on Linux
> >> systems, because no one has needed to bother with them since Linux
> >> switched to UTF-8 last millenium.
> >>
> >> Just stop using “Symbol” in R and things will work a lot better.
> >> Alternatively, prepare to maintain the “Symbol” aliasing stack in
> >> fontconfig (and fight with wine for it), because *no* *one* *else*
> >> *cares* about this legacy Windows-specific stuff.
> >
> > So, in the light of Nicolas' input (thanks!), I think that font
> > selection should be fixed upstream in R. I'd be happy to put all this
> > together in R's bugzilla, but I don't have an account. Could someone
> > please invite me?
> >
> > Iñaki
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >



-- 
Iñaki Úcar