I had been looking for information about including OSX fonts in R plots for a long time and never quite found the answer. I spent an hour or so gathering together the following solution which, as far as I have tested, works. I'm posting this for feedback and and archiving. I'd be interested in any caveats about the brittleness of the technique. Thanks. F ----- 1. Find font system font path: /Library/Fonts/ 2. Extract ttf (if necessary) with fondu [http://fondu.sourceforge.net/] eg, fondu -force Optima.dfont 3. ttf2asm for each ttf file, stripping the Copyright and warning 3. copy files to RHOME/library/grDevices/afm (usually, /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.5/Resources/library/grDevices/afm ) 4. R code to use the font; eg, newfont= Type1Font("Optima",c("OptimaRegular.afm","OptimaBold.afm","OptimaItalic.afm","OptimaBoldItalic.afm")) pdf("newfont.pdf",version = "1.4",family=newfont) plot(rnorm,col="red") dev.off()