R SIG Fedora - Mar 2024 - evince not showing "greek" and "math" in *.pdf plots

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

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

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 at r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
> 
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