Thirdly, the instructions are incomplete if you wish to have the figure reproduce on any system the fonts need to be embedded for those users that don’t have Arial installed. Second, they require the user to get and install the tt2afm utility (or some other utility that achieves the same job). afm files - the fifth file would be for the Symbol font, and if missing R will use the default) there is no reason to presume that R will continue to maintain this backwards-compatible behaviour. afm files with R’s postscript() plotting device.įirstly, the instructions refer to an older way of specifying font families (as a vector paths to four or five. afm (Adobe Font Metric) files via the tt2afm utility and subsequently registering the. These instructions basically involve converting the. These instructions even include some tips on creating your figures in R with the Arial font family. Or PLOS ONE could have stuck with the standard set of Postscript fonts, for which there are free equivalents.īob O’Hara raised this issue over a year ago, and Michael Eisen took the time to comment that this was an acknowledged issue and indicated that the problems stemmed from the publishing tools used by PLOS.ĭespite the draconian restrictions, PLOS ONE does have a pretty good set of instructions or tips to go alongside them, to help authors prepare figures for the journal. The Liberation Fonts aren’t copies of the Microsoft ones, but for a given string, they should occupy the same amount of real estate in the document or on screen. The aim was to provide a font that is metric compatible (i.e. the glyphs occupy the same physical space) with Microsoft’s Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New fonts that are prevalent in the Windows world. The Liberation Fonts suite for example is one such set of fonts, the creation of which was sponsored by Red Hat. What is doubly frustrating about this is that there are entirely free and open fonts that could be mandated by PLOS ONE. Secondly, you need to work very hard to use these fonts in some applications, including R as we’ll see, simply because those applications were built to use different or open font definitions. But the use of Arial! facepalm…įirstly, you may not legally be able to install these fonts on your computer (even though they are available in several forms on the internet) unless you have a licence for a Microsoft product that ships them - though given the dominance of Windows in the consumer PC market, most people will have a valid Windows licence somewhere. The choice of EPS is a pain, but can be worked round relatively easily and R can output to an EPS file via the postscript() device, as long as you follow a few basic guidelines, which I’ll cover below.
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