I can tell you why but not fully how to fix it. Newer versions of Pango uses harfbuzz for text shaping, which doesn't support type 1 or pcf fonts.
For things using pcf fonts (this has come up with i3bar users and terminus) the fonts want converting to otb (this probably needs a newer version of fonttosfnt than we have in xenocara, some commits fixing things for this type of conversion were landed there recently, though it looks like there may also be a way to do this with fontforge). In this case though it's type 1 fonts (.pfb files), it's fairly likely that you're actually using this font: $ fc-match helvetica n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular" This is from print/ghostscript/gnu-fonts which is in the dependency chain of R so you can't just pkg_delete it. As a dirty workaround you can move the pfb files out of /usr/local/share/fonts/ghostscript and I expect that will get it working for you. Unsure about a better fix though, maybe a fontconfig wizard will read this and step in with some clues :-) On 2020/01/05 17:05, Zé Loff wrote: > > Hi all > > On -current (#562), R's X11cairo device doesn't render the default font > properly, I get the "hex number inside a square" characters, instead, > e.g.: > > > plot(density(rnorm(1000))) > > According to X11.options(), the default fonts are -adobe-helvetica and > -adobe-symbol-medium: > > > X11.options()$fonts > [1] "-adobe-helvetica-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" > [2] "-adobe-symbol-medium-r-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" > > which are properly rendered by xfontsel, so I think this is strictly > Cairo-related. > > If the device is initialized with a different font, all text is properly > rendered: > > > dev.new(family = 'DejaVu Sans') > > plot(density(rnorm(1000)) > > The pdf() device also seems to work properly (with its default font) i.e. > > > pdf() > > plot(density(rnorm(1000)) > > dev.off() > > produces a PDF which is rendered properly by mupdf on the same machine. > > > > -- > >
