ggplot font family change between versions

Question

In the following picture you can see the same part of a ggplot graph, created in two different (windows) machines. Above each graph I have written the versions of the related packages. I am not using any font family setting in the ggplot call. Why do I get different fonts with the most recent version? (The change reminds me of the effect that Cleartype setting has in smoothing font edges)

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at this page, http://wiki.stdout.org/rcookbook/Graphs/Fonts/, for some tips on dealing with font issues with ggplot/ggplot2. Also there is an example R script that will generate a table of all the fonts rendered so you can compare them a little easier between the 2 systems.

make_font_table.R

fonttable <- read.table(header=TRUE, sep=",", stringsAsFactors=FALSE,
                        text='
Short,Canonical,
mono,Courier,
sans,Helvetica,
serif,Times
,AvantGarde
,Bookman
,Helvetica-Narrow
,NewCenturySchoolbook
,Palatino
,URWGothic
,URWBookman
,NimbusMon
URWHelvetica,NimbusSan
,NimbusSanCond
,CenturySch
,URWPalladio
URWTimes,NimbusRom
')

fonttable$pos <- 1:nrow(fonttable)

library(reshape2)
fonttable <- melt(fonttable, id.vars="pos", measure.vars=c("Short","Canonical"),
                  variable.name="NameType", value.name="Font")

# Make a table of faces. Make sure factors are ordered correctly
facetable <- data.frame(Face = factor(c("plain","bold","italic","bold.italic"),
                                      levels = c("plain","bold","italic","bold.italic")))

fullfonts <- merge(fonttable, facetable)

library(ggplot2)
pf <- ggplot(fullfonts, aes(x=NameType, y=pos)) + 
             geom_text(aes(label=Font, family=Font, fontface=Face)) +
             facet_wrap(~ Face, ncol=2)

pf

You can run it like so:

% R
> source ("make_font_table.R")
> pf

  

NOTICE: Only some of the fonts (Timea, Helvetica, Courier) are actually getting rendered.

Also you might want to check out the extrafont-package. Finally this post shows how to use the extrafont-package so that you get better looking fonts rendered in your output.