Home/ Questions/Q 401353
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T17:01:35+00:00

What graphics devices let me use system fonts for text within charts? The base

  • 0

What graphics devices let me use system fonts for text within charts? The base graphics system only has a small amount of documentation around the par(family=...) options.

Ideally I’d like to be able to use any font I can browse through a tool like xfontsel on Linux or the equivalent utilities on other platforms.

My current solution is to plot out as PDF and then use a 3rd party program to replace the fonts from within the PDF. This is not ideal.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A list of fonts is available to the pdf() command, like this:

    > names(pdfFonts())
 [1] "serif"                "sans"                 "mono"                
 [4] "AvantGarde"           "Bookman"              "Courier"             
 [7] "Helvetica"            "Helvetica-Narrow"     "NewCenturySchoolbook"
[10] "Palatino"             "Times"                "URWGothic"           
... etc ...

    To use when creating a PDF, for example:

    > pdf(file="plot.pdf",family="Palatino", pointsize=16, width=16,height=10)
    • 0