Error in grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, : polygon edge not found (new)

Question

I know that the title of this question is a duplicate of this Question and this Question but the solutions over there don't work for me and the error message is (slightly) different:

Error in grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  : 
polygon edge not found

(note the missing part about the missing font)

I tried all suggestions that I found (updating / reinstalling all loaded graphic packages, ggplot2, GGally, and scales, reinitialising the Fonts on Mac OSX by starting in safe mode, moving the Fonts from /Fonts/ (Disabled) back into /Fonts...) but none of it resolved the problem.

The error seems to occure when I plot a ggplot graph with

scale_y_continuous(label=scientific_10)

where scientific_10 is defined as

scientific_10 <- function(x) {
parse(text = gsub("e", " %*% 10^", scientific_format()(x)))
}

Therefore the I suspect that the scales library has something to do with it.

The most puzzling is that the error only occurs each so-and-so many times, maybe each 3rd or 5th time i try to plot the same graph...

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] gridExtra_2.0.0 scales_0.3.0    broom_0.4.0     tidyr_0.3.1             ggplot2_1.0.1   GGally_0.5.0    dplyr_0.4.3    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.11.5      magrittr_1.5     MASS_7.3-43      mnormt_1.5-1         munsell_0.4.2    colorspace_1.2-6 lattice_0.20-33  R6_2.0.1        
 [9] stringr_0.6.2    plyr_1.8.1       tools_3.2.2      parallel_3.2.2       grid_3.2.2       gtable_0.1.2     nlme_3.1-121     psych_1.5.8     
[17] DBI_0.3.1        htmltools_0.2.6  lazyeval_0.1.10  yaml_2.1.13      assertthat_0.1   digest_0.6.8     reshape2_1.4.1   rmarkdown_0.8.1 
[25] labeling_0.3     reshape_0.8.5    proto_0.3-10    

traceback()
35: grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, 
    resolveHJust(x$just, x$hjust), resolveVJust(x$just, x$vjust), 
    x$rot, 0)
34: widthDetails.text(x)
33: widthDetails(x)
32: (function (x) 
{
    widthDetails(x)
})(list(label = expression(5 %*% 10^+5, 7.5 %*% 10^+5, 1 %*% 
    10^+6, 1.25 %*% 10^+6, 1.5 %*% 10^+6), x = 1, y =   c(0.0777214770341215, 
0.291044141334423, 0.504366805634725, 0.717689469935027, 0.931012134235329
), just = "centre", hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5, rot = 0, check.overlap = FALSE, 
    name = "axis.text.y.text.8056", gp = list(fontsize = 9.6, 
        col = "black", fontfamily = "", lineheight = 0.9, font = 1L), 
    vp = NULL))
31: grid.Call.graphics(L_setviewport, vp, TRUE)
30: push.vp.viewport(X[[i]], ...)

Answer 1

I solved it by installing the library extrafont, installing a set of specific fonts and forcing ggplot to use only these fonts:

    require(extrafont)
    # need only do this once!
    font_import(pattern="[A/a]rial", prompt=FALSE)
    require(ggplot2)
    # extending the help file example
    df <- data.frame(gp = factor(rep(letters[1:3], each = 10)), y = rnorm(30))
    ds <- plyr::ddply(df, "gp", plyr::summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y))
    plotobj <- ggplot(df, aes(gp, y)) +
      geom_point() +
      geom_point(data = ds, aes(y = mean), colour = 'red', size = 3) + 
      theme(text=element_text(size=16, family="Arial"))
    print(plotobj)

Answer 2

I experienced the same issue when trying to plot ggplot/grid output to the graph window in Rstudio. However, plotting to an external graphing device seems to work fine.

The external device of choice depends on your system, but the script below, paraphrased from this blog, works for most systems:

a = switch(tolower(Sys.info()["sysname"]),
               "darwin"  = "quartz",
               "linux"   = "x11",
               "windows" = "windows")
options("device" = a)
graphics.off()
rm(a)

and to switch back to using the Rstudio plot window:

options("device"="RStudioGD")
graphics.off()

Note that by switching, you lose any existing plots.