Do we really need `showtext`?

[PavelBal]

The showtext packages has been causing us some troubles (plots looks different on different machines/environments). Do we actually need it? If so - why?

[Felixmil]

It also yields different results depending on if the plots are generated from:

• R Scripts,
• Notebooks (Quarto, Rmarkdown),
• pkgdown vignettes,
• roxygen2 examples

This package is a lot of trouble and I'm going to be honest: we should get rid of it.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[Yuri05]

What we need is that (at least) all symbols available in the plots in PK-Sim/MoBi can be displayed in R in the same default size.

This is not possible with the standard ggplot shapes - as you can see below, the standard shapes list: a) does not provide all required symbols b) displays some symbols in different sizes

That's why @pchelle tried different solutions and ended using showtext, which fulfills the requirements. If this can be realized without showtext - I don't care.

[PavelBal]

If there`s "Pentagon", I also wanna see an "OvalOffice" symbol.

But actually, I don't care as long we can use cute sheep as symbols.

[Yuri05]

But actually, I don't care as long we can use cute sheep as symbols.

Agree :)

[pchelle]

Other solutions not using showtext can be the package {ggimage} in which you can use directly images or emojis as geoms. Or using our own geom like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2181902/how-to-use-an-image-as-a-point-in-ggplot/36172385#36172385

Likewise showtext for which we stored a font file, we could store a set of vectorized images within the package and link the shapes to these images.

@Yuri05 , @PavelBal , @Felixmil , @KatrinCoboeken Thoughts ? Should we try one of them and get the relevant packages in validR ?

Here is how ggimage renders within the {ggtree} package

Note that the geom_emoji is actually relying on {showtext} in the backend !!

[KatrinCoboeken]

I'm not sure if I agree with Juri, that we need a one to one translation of all PK-Sim/Mobi symbols. How often do we really need so many symbols.

We could try to replace the "showtext option" in ospsuite.plots with ggimage. But I still would use the "pure" ggplot plotting shapes as often as possible. It is the most stable, its what the user knows and I would really miss things like the filled symbols when we usage images.

[pchelle]

Moreover, to include the new showtext shapes, I already tuned a geomTLFPoint so it may also be possible to leverage it and load images instead of using a text layer.

[KatrinCoboeken]

I copied the geomTLFPoint into ospsuite.plots renaming it to geomPointUnicode. it is sued if you switch on the option setDefaults(PointAsUnicode = TRUE)

[Felixmil]

I found another way to do this without using {showtext} but {ragg} and {systemfonts} instead: https://felixmil.github.io/ggplot2-custom-symbols-demo/

source repo: https://github.com/Felixmil/ggplot2-custom-symbols-demo

According to my tests, the outputs are consistants when rendered from code, html output (vignettes, websites etc) and pdfs.

Previews:

@KatrinCoboeken This preserves the "pure ggplot" approach.

[Yuri05]

I'm not sure if I agree with Juri, that we need a one to one translation of all PK-Sim/Mobi symbols. How often do we really need so many symbols.

PK-Sim/Mobi provides 11 different symbols. As long as the R plotting solution provides >=11 different symbols - the translation is possible and must be done. Obviously, if a PK-Sim/MoBi symbol is available in R, then that very symbol must be taken; if not - another symbol. So that we end up with the dictionary {PK-Sim/MoBi symbol <=> R symbol}

[Yuri05]

I found another way to do this without using {showtext} but {ragg} and {systemfonts} instead: https://felixmil.github.io/ggplot2-custom-symbols-demo/

source repo: https://github.com/Felixmil/ggplot2-custom-symbols-demo

According to my tests, the outputs are consistants when rendered from code, html output (vignettes, websites etc) and pdfs. @KatrinCoboeken This preserves the "pure ggplot" approach.

sounds promising :)