[R] Font problem

[Marc Schwartz]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 05:06, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> John Dougherty <jwdougherty at mcihispeed.net> writes:
> 
> > Some plots fail due to a problem with the X11 fonts.  I get a message that 
> > "X11 font at size 22 could not be loaded."  The demo() graphics routine for 
> > instance dies during the third chart.  The graphics demo calls "font.main=1" 
> > and that seems to be where the error is.  I believe this is due to a 
> > configuration problem on my system, however I can't find where in the 
> > environment font.main looks for the font to use.
> > 
> > I am running SuSE 9.0 and use the KDE desktop.  However, I have also 
> > replicated this in GNOME and WindowMaker.  Varying the fonts used by the 
> > console does notb effect the result.
> 
> I think that in principle the bug is in R, but as far as I remember,
> the workaround is to ensure that you either have scalable PostScript
> fonts or have non-scalable versions in both 100 and 75 dpi. This in
> turn is assured by configuring the font server.
> 
> On RedHat (dunno about SuSE),/etc/X11/fs/config needs to have
> something like
> 
> catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
>         /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
>         /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,
>         /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
>         /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
>         ...
> 
> or lose the :unscaled, but that tends to look horrible.

Based upon my recollection of a similar query, a quick search of the
mail archives shows that Peter and I responded to a similar problem
earlier this year.

The solution appears to be to edit the file that Peter mentions above to
include the lines (note the lack of the ':unscaled'):

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,

and to be sure that the 100 fonts were installed on the system.  Both
sets of lines should be present in the file.

I believe that a restart of X may be required to make the change, but a
restart of the X font server may suffice using:

/sbin/service xfs restart

HTH,

Marc Schwartz