R devel - Aug 2010 - One possible cause for incorrect symbols in X11() output

There have been spasmodic reports of symbols such as pi and infinity 
in plotmath being reproduced incorrectly on the X11 device on some 
Linux systems (at least Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 12/13), and we've managed 
to track down one cause whilst investigating PR#14355.

Some systems have Wine and hence the Wine symbol font installed. 
'fontconfig', which is used by cairographics in
X11(type='cairo') and
many other applications, prefers the Wine symbol font to the standard 
Type 1 URW font, and seems to misinterpret its encoding.

You may well have Wine installed without realizing it (as I did) -- it 
is increasingly common as a dependency of other software. The best 
test is to run

% fc-match symbol
s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"

This is the result on a system without Wine: if you see

% fc-match symbol
symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"

you at least potentially have the problem.  A good test is to look at 
?points and run the function TestChars() defined there as

TestChars(font=5)

If you do have the problem, a workaround is to add the following lines 
to ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf (which you may need to 
create):

<match target="pattern">
   <test
name="family"><string>Symbol</string></test>
   <edit name="family" mode="prepend"
binding="same">
     <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
   </edit>
</match>

and repeat the fc-match test to check that it worked.

(This workaround was culled from
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/551977
)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

On 19/08/10 09:55 AM, "Prof Brian Ripley" <ripley at
stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> There have been spasmodic reports of symbols such as pi and infinity
> in plotmath being reproduced incorrectly on the X11 device on some
> Linux systems (at least Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 12/13), and we've managed
> to track down one cause whilst investigating PR#14355.
> 
> Some systems have Wine and hence the Wine symbol font installed.
> 'fontconfig', which is used by cairographics in
X11(type='cairo') and
> many other applications, prefers the Wine symbol font to the standard
> Type 1 URW font, and seems to misinterpret its encoding.
> 
> You may well have Wine installed without realizing it (as I did) -- it
> is increasingly common as a dependency of other software. The best
> test is to run
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
> 
> This is the result on a system without Wine: if you see
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"
> 
This seems to be the case with MacOS (10.6.4):

$ uname -a
Darwin lettu-2.local 10.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.4.0: Fri Apr 23
18:28:53 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.7.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
$ fc-match symbol
Symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "???"

The X11(type = 'cairo') shows the problem with example(points);
TestChars(font=5). However, there is no problem with the default device
(quartz), nor with the default X11() which has type = 'Xlib' (unlike
documented in ?X11: 'cairo' is available but 'Xlib' still used).

What ever this is worth of (if this is worthless, I'll surely hear about
it).

Cheers, Jari Oksanen

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 07:55 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley
wrote:
> There have been spasmodic reports of symbols such as pi and infinity 
> in plotmath being reproduced incorrectly on the X11 device on some 
> Linux systems (at least Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 12/13), and we've managed 
> to track down one cause whilst investigating PR#14355.
> 
> Some systems have Wine and hence the Wine symbol font installed. 
> 'fontconfig', which is used by cairographics in
X11(type='cairo') and
> many other applications, prefers the Wine symbol font to the standard 
> Type 1 URW font, and seems to misinterpret its encoding.
> 
> You may well have Wine installed without realizing it (as I did) -- it 
> is increasingly common as a dependency of other software. The best 
> test is to run
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
> 
> This is the result on a system without Wine: if you see
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"
> 
> you at least potentially have the problem.  A good test is to look at 
> ?points and run the function TestChars() defined there as
> 
> TestChars(font=5)
> 
> If you do have the problem, a workaround is to add the following lines 
> to ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf (which you may need to 
> create):
> 
> <match target="pattern">
>    <test
name="family"><string>Symbol</string></test>
>    <edit name="family" mode="prepend"
binding="same">
>      <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
>    </edit>
> </match>
> 
> and repeat the fc-match test to check that it worked.
Hi,

I tried the suggested change to ~/.fonts.conf but am getting an error
from fontconfig:

$ fc-match symbol
Fontconfig error: "~/.fonts.conf", line 10: junk after document
element
s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
$ cat ~/.fonts.conf
<match target="pattern">
        <test name="family">
                <string>Symbol</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="family" mode="prepend"
binding="same">
                <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
        </edit>
</match>

<alias binding="same">
       <family>ZapfDingbats</family>
       <accept><family>Dingbats</family></accept>
</alias>

I have an alias in there to solve the "q" symbol being used in Evince
etc in place of pch == 1.

Am I inserting this incorrectly?

Many thanks,

G
> 
> (This workaround was culled from
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/551977
> )
> 
-- 
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 Dr. Gavin Simpson             [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
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