showtext: Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs

Introduction

In many cases, using non-standard fonts in R graphs is not an easy task, especially for PDF devices. For example, creating PDF graphs with Chinese characters may take a lot of extra work. Also, R users may have installed various fonts in their systems, but for many graphics devices there is no direct and portable way to make use of those fonts.

The extrafont package developed by Winston Chang is one nice solution to this problem, which mainly focuses on using TrueType fonts (.ttf) in PDF graphics device.

Now a new solution, the showtext package, is able to support more font formats and more graphics devices, and avoids using external software such as Ghostscript. showtext makes it even easier to use various types of fonts (TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, web fonts, etc.) in R graphs.

A Quick Example

Below is a quick example to show the functionality of the showtext package.

library(showtext)
## Loading Google fonts (https://fonts.google.com/)
font_add_google("Gochi Hand", "gochi")
font_add_google("Schoolbell", "bell")

## Automatically use showtext to render text
showtext_auto()

set.seed(123)
hist(rnorm(1000), breaks = 30, col = "steelblue", border = "white",
     main = "", xlab = "", ylab = "")
title("Histogram of Normal Random Numbers", family = "bell", cex.main = 2)
title(ylab = "Frequency", family = "gochi", cex.lab = 2)
text(2, 70, "N = 1000", family = "bell", cex = 2.5)

In this example we first load fonts that are available online through Google Fonts, and then tell R to render text using showtext by calling the showtext_auto() function. All the remaining part is exactly the same as the usual plotting commands.

This example should work on most graphics devices, including pdf(), png(), postscript(), and on-screen devices such as windows() on Windows and x11() on Linux.

The Usage

To create a graph using showtext, you simply do the following:

• (*) Load the font
• Open the graphics device
• (*) Claim that you want to use showtext to render the text
• Plot
• Close the device

Only the steps marked with (*) are new. If you want to use showtext globally, you can call the function showtext_auto() once, and then all the devices after that will automatically use showtext to render text, as the example in the beginning shows.

If you want to have finer control on which part of the code should use showtext, functions showtext_begin() and showtext_end() will help. Only plotting functions enclosed by this pair of calls will use showtext, and others not. For example, to change the title font only, we can do:

library(showtext)
font_add_google("Schoolbell", "bell")

set.seed(123)
hist(rnorm(1000), breaks = 30, col = "steelblue", border = "white",
     main = "Histogram of Normal Random Numbers", xlab = "", ylab = "Frequency")

showtext_begin()
text(2, 70, "N = 1000", family = "bell", cex = 2.5)
showtext_end()

Loading Fonts

Loading font is actually done by package sysfonts.

The easy way to load font into showtext is by calling

font_add(family = "<family_name>", regular = "/path/to/font/file")

where family is the name that you assign to that font (so that later you can call par(family = "<family_name>") to use this font in plotting), and regular is the path to the font file. That is to say, only knowing the “font name” is not sufficient to identify the font, since the names are usually system dependent. On the contrary, font file is the entity that actually provides the character glyphs.

Usually the font files are located in some “standard” directories in the system (for example on Windows it is typically C:\Windows\Fonts). You can use font_paths() to check the current search path or add a new one, and use font_files() to list available font files in the search path.

Below is an example to load system fonts on Windows:

library(showtext)

## HeiTi font for Chinese characters
font_add("heiti", "simhei.ttf")
## Constantia font with regular and italic font faces
font_add("constan", regular = "constan.ttf", italic = "constani.ttf")

showtext_auto()

library(ggplot2)
p = ggplot(NULL, aes(x = 1, y = 1)) + ylim(0.8, 1.2) +
    theme(axis.title = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank(),
          axis.text = element_blank()) +
    annotate("text", 1, 1.1, family = "heiti", size = 15,
             label = "\u4F60\u597D\uFF0C\u4E16\u754C") +
    annotate("text", 1, 0.9, label = 'Chinese for "Hello, world!"',
             family = "constan", fontface = "italic", size = 12)

## On-screen device
x11()
print(p)

## PNG device
ggsave("load_fonts.png", width = 7, height = 4, dpi = 96)

## turn off if no longer needed
showtext_auto(FALSE)

For other OS, you may not have the simhei.ttf font file, but there is no difficulty in using the alternatives. At present font_add() supports TrueType fonts (.ttf/.ttc) and OpenType fonts (.otf), and adding new font type is trivial as long as FreeType supports it.

Also, there are many free fonts available and accessible on the web, for instance the Google Fonts project (https://fonts.google.com/). sysfonts provides an interface to automatically download and register those fonts through the function font_add_google(), as the example below shows.

Working with R Markdown

showtext can work with Rmarkdown/knitr nicely if you take care of the following two points:

1. Add a fig.showtext = TRUE option to the block where you use showtext for graphs.
2. Add a fig_retina = 1 option to the document header if you use HTML output. Without this option you may see figures with very small fonts.

Below is a minimal example of using showtext in Rmarkdown:

---
output:
    html_document:
        fig_retina: 1
---

```{r fig.showtext=TRUE}
library(showtext)
font_add_google("Lobster", "lobster")
showtext_auto()


plot(1, pch = 16, cex = 3)
text(1, 1.1, "A fancy dot", family = "lobster", col = "steelblue", cex = 3)
```

CJK Fonts

showtext includes an open source CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) font WenQuanYi Micro Hei. If you just want to show CJK text in your graph, simply specify the wqy-microhei family name in plotting functions.

Another option is to install the Source Han Sans/Serif fonts locally using the following code:

library(showtext)
font_install(source_han_serif())
font_families()
[1] "sans"                "serif"               "mono"                "wqy-microhei"       
[5] "source-han-serif-cn"

See ?font_install and ?source_han for more details.

How showtext Works

showtext renders text by converting it into color-filled polygonal outlines (for vector graphics) or raster images (for bitmap and on-screen graphics). Therefore, the rendered text has the same appearance under all platforms. People who view the graph do not need to install the font that creates the graph. Of course as a price, the actual text information is lost in this procedure.

The idea above can be better explained by the diagram below.

A more detailed introduction to the showtext package can be found in the R Journal article.

Compatibility with RStudio

Previously showtext did not work well with the RStudio graphics device (RStudioGD), but starting from version 0.9, this issue has been fixed. Simply call showtext_auto() in the RStudio session and then the plots will be displayed correctly.