Home/ Questions/Q 8649913
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-12T13:40:44+00:00

How can I use Unicode characters for labels, titles and similar things in a

  • 0

How can I use Unicode characters for labels, titles and similar things in a PDF plot created with ggplot2?

Consider the following example:

library(ggplot2)
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
ggsave("t.pdf")

The title of the plot uses Unicode characters (small caps), which in the output appear as .... The problem occurs only with pdf plots; if I replace the last line with ggsave("t.png"), then the output is as expected.

What am I doing wrong? The R script I have is in UTF-8 encoding. Some system information:

R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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

When searching for a solution for this problem, I found some evidence that R uses a single-byte encoding for mutli-byte encodigns such as UTF-8 for PDF or postscript output. I also found suggestions to, for instance, be able to get the Euro sign working, but no general solution.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As Ben suggested, cairo_pdf() is your friend. It also allows you to embed non-postscript fonts (i.e. TTF/OTF) in the PDF via the family argument (crucial if you don’t happen to have any postscript fonts that contain the glyphs you want to use). For example:

    library(ggplot2)
cairo_pdf("example.pdf", family="DejaVu Sans")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()

    …gives a PDF that looks like this:
    ggplot2 graph with custom font family and non-ASCII characters in the title

    See also this question; though it doesn’t look directly relevant from the title, there is a lot in there about getting fonts to do what you want in R.

    EDIT per request in comments, here is the windows-specific code:

    library(ggplot2)
windowsFonts(myCustomWindowsFontName=windowsFont("DejaVu Sans"))
cairo_pdf("example.pdf", family="myCustomWindowsFontName")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()

    To use the base graphics command cairo_pdf() it should suffice to just define your font family with the windowsFonts() command first, as shown above. Of course, make sure you use a font that you actually have on your system, and that actually has all the glyphs that you need.

    TThe instructions about DLL files in the comments below are what I had to do to get the Cairo() and CairoPDF() commands in library(Cairo) to work on Windows. Then:

    library(ggplot2)
library(Cairo)
windowsFonts(myCustomWindowsFontName=windowsFont("DejaVu Sans"))
CairoPDF("example.pdf")
par(family="myCustomWindowsFontName")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()
    • 0