Extrafont and ggsave: Characters end up on top of another

Question

I'm currently trying to use Arial.ttf in all my plots. I have found several manuals about fonts online, I'm however running into issues when I try to save the pot via ggsave and the default device.

Minimal working example

I'm running the following minimal working example to reproduce this bug:

Sys.setenv(R_GSCMD="D:/gs/bin/gswin64c.exe")  library(ggplot2)  require(extrafont) font_import(prompt = F, pattern = "arial.ttf") font_import(prompt = F, pattern = "JOKERMAN.TTF") loadfonts(device="win", quiet = T) loadfonts(device="pdf", quiet = T)  plot <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg, colour = hp)) + geom_point() jokerman_plot <- plot + theme_bw(base_family = "Jokerman") arial_plot <- plot + theme_bw(base_family = "Arial")  ggsave("arial_plot.png", arial_plot) ggsave("arial_plot.pdf", arial_plot) embed_fonts("arial_plot.pdf")  ggsave("jokerman_plot.png", jokerman_plot) ggsave("jokerman_plot.pdf", jokerman_plot) embed_fonts("jokerman_plot.pdf") 

This results in the following (correct) PNG images:

The Arial PDF, however, has all characters stacked on top of each other (the Jokerman PDF renders correct):

Warning output

The following warning messages are generated by this script.

Warning messages: 1: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x68 2: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x70 3: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font metrics unknown for character 0x4d 4: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x68 5: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x70 6: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x4e 7: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x41 8: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font metrics unknown for character 0x4d 9: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x31 10: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 11: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 12: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x31 13: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x35 14: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 15: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x32 16: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 17: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 18: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x32 19: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x35 20: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 21: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x33 22: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 23: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 24: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x4e 25: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x41 26: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x4e 27: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x41 28: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x31 29: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 30: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 31: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x31 32: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x35 33: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 34: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x32 35: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 36: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 37: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x32 38: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x35 39: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 40: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x33 41: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 42: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x30 43: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x4e 44: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x41 45: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x6d 46: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x70 47: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x67 48: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font metrics unknown for character 0x4d 49: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x6d 50: In grid.Call(L_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label),  ... :   font width unknown for character 0x70 

Session info

My current sessionInfo()

R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit) Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)  locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252  LC_CTYPE=German_Germany.1252    LC_MONETARY=German_Germany.1252 [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                    LC_TIME=German_Germany.1252      attached base packages: [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base       other attached packages: [1] extrafont_0.17      ggplot2_2.1.0       RevoUtilsMath_3.2.5  loaded via a namespace (and not attached):  [1] labeling_0.3     colorspace_1.2-6 scales_0.4.0     assertthat_0.1   plyr_1.8.3       tools_3.3.0       [7] gtable_0.2.0     ggthemes_3.0.3   Rcpp_0.12.5      extrafontdb_1.0  grid_3.3.0       digest_0.6.9     [13] Rttf2pt1_1.3.4   munsell_0.4.3   

Attempted solutions

• I've tried several ways of renaming the generated AMF files to no avail
• I've thought that maybe the encoding of my source file might matter, so I changed it to UTF-8 (no change)
• Resetting extrafontdb multiple times
• Reinstalling ghostscript multiple times

Workarounds

I have currently two workarounds, I would, however, prefer to use the "native" PDF device as configured in R or ggplot for portability sake

1. Specify cairo_pdf as a device (This can cause secondary issues with output or some plots to render slightly different). The PDF is fine, so could this point to a bug in the default PDF device?
2. Use PNG/bitmap output (I want to use the plots in print, so vector output is preferred)
3. Rely on R using ArialMT as default. I'm not sure if ArialMT is exactly the same font as used in my (Latex) document, so I would like to specify to font explicitly.

Answer 1

Instead of using ggsave(), try exporting it using the code below into your working directory run the three(3) lines together, It should be able to solve the problem for you. Comment below if you have further questions.

e.g

png("arial_plot.png", width = 8, height = 7, units = 'in', res = 300, compression ='lzw')       arial_plot    dev.off()