Will extrafont work with OpenType (*.otf) fonts like Myriad Pro?

[bshor]

Lots of the new fonts in Windows 7 (and I think Mac) are OpenType, which I think is a superset of TrueType. Perhaps 50% of the fonts on my Win7 machine are TrueType, and that's just from installing standard Microsoft applications.

[wch]

Hmm. This may require recompiling ttf2pt1 to use the FreeType 2 library, instead of relying on ttf2pt1's built-in ttf-to-afm capabilities. Hopefully ghostscript can also embed OTF fonts directly, as it can with TTF fonts.

[wch]

I've implemented this in an experimental branch. If you could test it out, that would be great.

Here's how to install it (you'll need a compiler installed, via the Windows RTools):

library(devtools)
install_github("Rttf2pt1", "wch", "freetype2")
install_github("extrafont", "wch", "freetype")

# Once it's installed, import the fonts as before:
library(extrafont)
font_import()

[markheckmann]

Hi Winston, I ran into some issues using OTF fonts. Several fonts are imported and registered (e.g. Trade Gothic LT Std):

> tail(fonts(), 10)
 [1] "Trade Gothic LT Std" "Trajan Pro"          "Trebuchet MS"        "Tw Cen MT"          
 [5] "Verdana"             "Webdings"            "Wingdings"           "Wingdings 2"        
 [9] "Wingdings 3"         "Zapfino"            
> loadfonts()
...
Registering font with R using pdfFonts(): Trade Gothic LT Std
Registering font with R using pdfFonts(): Trajan Pro
Registering font with R using pdfFonts(): Trebuchet MS
...

Some issue arise when using the font (e.g. Trade Gothic LT Std):

pdf("test.pdf")
    grid.text("some test text", .5, .5, gp=gpar(fontfamily="Trade Gothic LT Std"))
dev.off()

Warning messages:
1: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  unknown AFM entity encountered
2: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  unknown AFM entity encountered
3: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  unknown AFM entity encountered
4: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  unknown AFM entity encountered
5: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  font width unknown for character 0x20
6: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
  font width unknown for character 0x20

The character 0x20 appears to be a blank space as it is not shown in the pdf output for the OTF fonts I have installed. In the pic below I printed the same text using several TTF / TTC (No. 1-10) and OTF fonts (No.>10). All OTF fonts lack the blank space.

[wch]

@markheckmann I just rebased and push the freetype branches for Rttf2pt1 and extrafont. Could you try to re-install them, and re-import the fonts?

This might be related to #11, but I think the previous freetype branch didn't get that fix.

[markheckmann]

@wch I just reinstalled the freetype branches for both packages and reimported the fonts. When installing Rttf2pt1 I get quite a lot of warnings:

ttf2pt1.c: In function 'unicode_init_user':
ttf2pt1.c:647: warning: format '%d' expects type 'int *', but argument 3 has type 'int' 
ttf2pt1.c:647: warning: format '%d' expects type 'int *', but argument 4 has type 'int'
...
pt1.c:307: warning: format '%x' expects type 'unsigned int', but argument 3 has type 'struct GENTRY *'
pt1.c:307: warning: format '%x' expects type 'unsigned int', but argument 4 has type 'struct GENTRY *'
...

The output still lacks the spaces. But the warnings have changed: Only the last two warnings remain.

pdf("test.pdf")
    grid.text("some test text", .5, .5, gp=gpar(fontfamily="Trade Gothic LT Std"))
dev.off()

 Warning messages:
 1: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :+1: 
   font width unknown for character 0x20
 2: In grid.Call.graphics(L_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y,  :
   font width unknown for character 0x20

[ghost]

The lacking spaces are definitively an issue -- even for TTF-fonts that seem to somehow contain OTF standards: I tried to use the regular Constantia font which ships with Windows since 2007, CONSTAN.TTF. Same problem as described for OTF fonts above.

At least I could find a workaround: I opened CONSTAN.TTF with fontforge and let it create a new font (const.ttf) from it, unsetting the OTF-tickbutton in the "Options" submenu before saving. Using const.ttf instead, the spaces show up as they should.

[ellisp]

I am trying to import an .otf font into R 3.0.3 on Windows 7. I have previously had no problem installing and using (with cairo_pdf but not pdf) truetype fonts on this setup. The freetype2 branch of Rttf2pt1 described above seems to install ok, but with lots of warnings; the freetype branch of extrafont installs fine. When I try to import the fonts it delivers warnings. But the font is not working - a test use of the font draws a plot (not shown) using the R default sans font.

The culprit looks likely to be in Rttf2pt1. Is there anything I can try?

> font_import(pattern="Gustan", prompt=FALSE)
Scanning ttf files in C:\Windows\Fonts ...
Extracting .afm files from .ttf files...
C:\Windows\Fonts\Gustan-Black.otf => C:/Users/Peter Ellis/Documents/R/win-library/3.0/extrafontdb/metrics/Gustan-Black
C:\Windows\Fonts\Gustan-BlackItalic.otf => C:/Users/Peter Ellis/Documents/R/win-library/3.0/extrafontdb/metrics/Gustan-BlackItalic
...
Found FontName for 16 fonts.
Scanning afm files in C:/Users/Peter Ellis/Documents/R/win-library/3.0/extrafontdb/metrics
Writing font table in C:/Users/Peter Ellis/Documents/R/win-library/3.0/extrafontdb/fontmap/fonttable.csv
Writing Fontmap to C:/Users/Peter Ellis/Documents/R/win-library/3.0/extrafontdb/fontmap/Fontmap...
There were 16 warnings (use warnings() to see them)

> warnings()
Warning messages:
1: In readLines(fd, 30) : seek on a gzfile connection returned an internal error
2: In readLines(fd, 30) : seek on a gzfile connection returned an internal error
...
> loadfonts("win")
Registering font with R using windowsFonts(): Gustan
> loadfonts("pdf")
...
> phrase <- "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
> plot(1:10, 1:10, main=phrase, family="Gustan")

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_New Zealand.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_New Zealand.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_New Zealand.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                        
[5] LC_TIME=English_New Zealand.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] extrafont_0.15.99 devtools_1.4.1   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] digest_0.6.4    evaluate_0.5.1  extrafontdb_1.0 httr_0.3       
 [5] memoise_0.1     parallel_3.0.3  RCurl_1.95-4.1  Rttf2pt1_1.1.99
 [9] stringr_0.6.2   tools_3.0.3     whisker_0.3-2  

An unrelated problem is distinguishing between the various families and sub-families, but I can fix that by editing the fonttable and it seems nothing to do with actual import of the OTF font.

[wch]

Those branches were based on an older versions of extrafont and Rttf2pt1. I just pushed some changes to those branches. Can you try reinstalling them from github and see if it works now?

[ellisp]

Thanks - super quick response! but, no I deleted extrafontdb and reinstalled it from CRAN and the other two from github as per the above, and it still has the same result.

Some extra info - I had previously successfully converted these OTF fonts to TTF and used them that way and they looked fine, but we're working with a designer who needs us to use the exact OTF fonts so they are the same as those from other inputs to the project.

[wch]

The compile warnings are normal for Rttf2pt1. Have you tried the following?

• Create PDF and embed the fonts into it
• Create a PNG

[ellisp]

Yes, tried creating PDFs and PNGs and didn't work. I've now switched to using {Cairo} rather than {extrafont} for this use, which seems to do the job fine. Thanks for your help, and the useful package, anyway.

[mgaudet]

So, just to clarify what ellisp meant for future Googlers like myself, from my reverse engineering of his comment:

You can correct the spaces problem, even for PDF output, by installing the Cairo library, and using the device=cairo_pdf argument of the ggsave call.

This seems to work for me; I haven't checked yet however if Cairo requires loadfonts, but at the moment I'm happy... I seem to be producing OTF enabled plots!

[ddauer]

On Mac (10.10) with R 3.2.0 and

install_github("Rttf2pt1", "wch", "freetype2")
install_github("extrafont", "wch", "freetype")
library(extrafont)
font_import()

all I get for all .otf files is

...
/Library/Fonts/MyriadPro-Regular.otf : No FontName. Skipping.
...

[jolars]

Same here. No FontName. Skipping. for every font file, both .otf and .ttf

[mdmadhu]

Ditto on macOS Sierra (10.12) and R 3.3.3. Was there any solution to this?

[wch]

For what it's worth, I updated the the freetype2 branch of Rttf2pt1 and the freetype branch of extrafont. It imports Myriad Pro for me (I'm running macOS 10.12.3):

library(devtools)
install_github("wch/Rttf2pt1@freetype2")
install_github("wch/extrafont@freetype")
library(extrafont)
font_import(pattern = "Myriad.*", prompt=FALSE)
# Scanning ttf files in /Library/Fonts/, /System/Library/Fonts, ~/Library/Fonts/ ...
# Extracting .afm files from .ttf files...
# /Users/winston/Library/Fonts/MyriadPro-Regular.otf => /Users/winston/R/3.3/extrafontdb/metrics/MyriadPro-Regular
# Found FontName for 1 fonts.
# Scanning afm files in /Users/winston/R/3.3/extrafontdb/metrics
# Writing font table in /Users/winston/R/3.3/extrafontdb/fontmap/fonttable.csv
# Writing Fontmap to /Users/winston/R/3.3/extrafontdb/fontmap/Fontmap...
# Warning messages:
# 1: In readLines(fd, 30) :
#   seek on a gzfile connection returned an internal error
# 2: In grepl("^FamilyName", text) :
#   input string 4 is invalid in this locale
# 3: In grepl("^FontName", text) : input string 4 is invalid in this locale
# 4: In grepl("^FullName", text) : input string 4 is invalid in this locale
# 5: In grepl("^Weight", text) : input string 4 is invalid in this locale

fonttable()
#   package                  afmfile                                           fontfile   FullName FamilyName
# 1      NA MyriadPro-Regular.afm.gz /Users/winston/Library/Fonts/MyriadPro-Regular.otf Myriad Pro Myriad Pro
#            FontName  Bold Italic Symbol afmsymfile
# 1 MyriadPro-Regular FALSE  FALSE  FALSE         NA

session_info()
# Session info -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  setting  value                       
#  version  R version 3.3.2 (2016-10-31)
#  system   x86_64, darwin13.4.0        
#  ui       RStudio (1.1.104)           
#  language (EN)                        
#  collate  en_US.UTF-8                 
#  tz       America/Chicago             
#  date     2017-03-14                  
# 
# Packages ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  package     * version   date       source                        
#  devtools    * 1.12.0    2016-06-24 CRAN (R 3.3.0)                
#  digest        0.6.12    2017-01-27 cran (@0.6.12)                
#  extrafont   * 0.16.0.99 2017-03-15 Github (wch/extrafont@bdc21a0)
#  extrafontdb   1.0       2012-06-11 CRAN (R 3.3.0)                
#  memoise       1.0.0     2016-01-29 CRAN (R 3.3.0)                
#  rstudioapi    0.6       2016-06-27 CRAN (R 3.3.0)                
#  Rttf2pt1      1.3.0.99  2017-03-15 Github (wch/Rttf2pt1@d15ee89) 
#  withr         1.0.2     2016-06-20 CRAN (R 3.3.0)                

I haven't done any more work on it, and it's possible that more fixes are necessary. Notably, the warnings probably shouldn't be there. I don't have much time to devote to this anytime soon, though. So if someone feels like taking up this project, please feel free to clean it up and submit a PR.