On Jul 3, 2011, at 5:13 AM, Daithi Murray wrote:
> To whom it may concern,
>
> I am e-mailing you concerning the use of Arial Font in the program R
> and I
> am using a mac.
>
> I am trying to create graphs in R and the publisher I wish to
> publish an
> article with needs the font to be Arial. I have tried looking around
> to find
> out how to do this with no luck and must help on the topic is geared
> towards
> Linux users - the only help available is from the PLoS ONE site:
>
First thing I did was check to see if Arial was already in my list of
psotscriptFonts:
names(postscriptFonts()) # Nope not there
Then I used the Mac Font Book.app to see if it was on my system. It
is. (And it's just an ordinary sans serif font, nothing special.)
Then I right-clicked and asked to show it in the Finder. It is in /
Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts/Microsoft/ and is named Arial.ttf rather
than arial.ttf and the names of the italic, bold, and bold-italic
faces have spaces and are also capitalized.
(Now, I cannot be sure that you will find such a font on your system.
I have installed several MS products and it seems possible that this
font is there only because of that. And I do not know what the
licensing provisions are.)
I then checked using Terminal.app to see if the utility program you
were advised to use was on my system:
david-winsemiuss-mac-pro:~ davidwinsemius$ locate ttf2afm
# It seems to be present as a result of having installed the Tex
package since all of the directories where it is found are descendants
of /usr/local/texlive
> Enable the use of Arial in R
>
> First, convert the Arial .ttf files to afm:
This is implicitly telling you to do these actions from a system
window such as you get with Terminal.app
I wish I could report that my efforts at following these instructions
worked but I get the creation of zero MB files in my ~/ directory
>
> ttf2afm /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts/arial.ttf > ~/arial.afm
> ttf2afm /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts/ariali.ttf > ~/ariali.afm
> ttf2afm /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts/arialbd.ttf > ~/arialbd.afm
> ttf2afm /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts/arialbi.ttf > ~/arialbi.afm
>
> and then do the following in R:
>
> postscript(file="try.ps", horizontal=F,
> onefile=F,
> width=4, height=4,
> family=c("/home/stephen/arial.afm",
> "/home/stephen/arialbd.afm",
> "/home/stephen/ariali.afm",
> "/home/stephen/arialbi.afm"),
> pointsize=12)
> hist(rnorm(100))
> dev.off()
>
> However, I do not have the above files and do not know where to get
> them.
My advice. Use an available sans-serif font. The default sans serif
font on the R Mac combo is Helvetica but you can ensure its use with....
> postscript(file="try.ps", horizontal=F,
+ onefile=F,
+ width=4, height=4,
+ family="Helvetica",
+ pointsize=12)
> hist(rnorm(100))
> dev.off()
null device
1
If the people at the other end want to use font substitution then that
should be easily accomplished. There should be enough information in
the ps file for their software to figure out that you used a 12-point
sans-serif font.
(This is really a question better posed on the R-Mac-SIG mailing list
to which I am cross-posting and to which follow-ups should be
directed .... without following up to rhelp.)
>
> Many thanks,
>
> D. M
>
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT