this may help others. among the set of font resources are the following:
http://yihui.name/en/2010/03/font-families-for-the-r-pdf-device/
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/grDevices/html/postscriptFonts.html
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/grDevices/html/embedFonts.html
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/R/CM/CMR.html
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Truetype-and-Opentype-font-in-pdf-device-td3218964.html
I don't think there is a complete font installation guide for R
anywhere yet. (I may be wrong.)
now, for me, the following worked on OSX, thanks to a website I found
and thanks to Simon U's Cairo library:
[a] use http://www.freefontconverter.com/ to create an opentype font.
(this website is amazing. I tore my hair out before I discovered it.)
[b] double click on each of the OTF files to install the fonts in OSX.
[c] install from cran Simon Urbanek's Cairo package
> install.packages("Cairo")
[d] load Cairo
> library(Cairo)
[e] make sure it can find my new font
> CairoFontMatch(fontpattern="Bitstream
Charter",sort=FALSE,verbose=FALSE)
1. family: "Bitstream Charter", style: "Roman", file:
"/Users/iaw4/Library/Fonts/bchr8a.otf"
[f] set it to be the default font
> CairoFonts( regular="Bitstream Charter:style=Regular" )
you may also want to set the other four R fonts, as described in the docs.
[g] create a sample file,
> CairoPDF(file="testcharter.pdf")
> plot( c(0,1), c(0,1) )
> text( 0.5, 0.5, "This is Bitstream Charter")
> dev.off
[h] use Adobe Acrobat -> File -> Properties to confirm that your new
font is really Bitstream Charter.
/iaw
----
Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)