Changing fonts in ggplot2

Question

Once upon a time  I changed my ggplot2 font using using windowsFonts Times windowsFont  TT Times New Roman    to change it   Now I can t get it off of this   In trying to set family    in ggplot2 theme   I can t seem to generate a change in fonts as I compile the MWE below with different font families   library ggplot2  library extrafont  loadfonts device    win    a  lt - ggplot mtcars  aes x wt  y mpg     geom point             ggtitle  Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars             xlab  Weight  x1000 lb      ylab  Miles per Gallon             theme text element text size 16           family  Comic Sans MS            family  CM Roman            family  TT Times New Roman            family  Sans            family  Serif      print a  print  Graph should have refreshed     R is returning a warning font family not found in Windows font database  but there was a tutorial I was following  if I can find it again I will update the link here  that said this was normal and not a problem   Also  somehow this worked at one point because my graph once used some arial or helvitica type font   I think this has always been a present warning even during the initial times migration   UPDATE  when I run windowsFonts   my output is      serif  1   TT Times New Roman        sans  1   TT Arial        mono  1   TT Courier New    But  this is after I ran font import   so I can only conclude that my fonts are not being saved in the right place   The code that ran the font import   request actually loads the libraries with   LocalLibraryLocation  lt - paste0  C   Users    Sys getenv  USERNAME      Documents     R  win-library  3 2         libPaths c LocalLibraryLocation   libPaths

User · Answer

A simple answer if you don t want to install anything new  To change all the fonts in your plot plot   theme text element text family  mono    Where mono is your chosen font   List of default font options    mono sans serif Courier Helvetica Times AvantGarde Bookman Helvetica-Narrow NewCenturySchoolbook Palatino URWGothic URWBookman NimbusMon URWHelvetica NimbusSan NimbusSanCond CenturySch URWPalladio URWTimes NimbusRom   R doesn t have great font coverage and  as Mike Wise points out  R uses different names for common fonts   This page goes through the default fonts in detail

User · Answer

Late to the party  but this might be of interest for people looking to add custom fonts to their ggplots inside a shiny app on shinyapps io   You can    Place custom font in www directory  e g  IndieFlower ttf from here Follow the steps from here   This leads to the following upper section inside the app R file   dir create     fonts   file copy  www IndieFlower ttf       fonts   system  fc-cache -f    fonts     A full example app can be found here

User · Answer

Another option is to use showtext package which supports more types of fonts  TrueType  OpenType  Type 1  web fonts  etc   and more graphics devices  and avoids using external software such as Ghostscript     install packages  showtext   dependencies   TRUE  library showtext   Import some Google Fonts   https   fonts google com featured Superfamilies font add google  quot Montserrat quot    quot Montserrat quot   font add google  quot Roboto quot    quot Roboto quot    Load font from the current search path into showtext   Check the current search path for fonts font paths         gt   1   quot C   Windows  Fonts quot     List available font files in the search path font files         gt     1   quot AcadEref ttf quot                                    gt     2   quot AGENCYB TTF quot                               gt   428   quot pala ttf quot                                        gt   429   quot palab ttf quot                                       gt   430   quot palabi ttf quot                                      gt   431   quot palai ttf quot     syntax  font add family    quot  lt family name gt  quot   regular    quot  path to font file quot   font add  quot Palatino quot    quot pala ttf quot    font families     gt   1   quot sans quot           quot serif quot          quot mono quot           quot wqy-microhei quot    gt   5   quot Montserrat quot     quot Roboto quot         quot Palatino quot      automatically use showtext for new devices showtext auto     Plot  need to open Windows graphics device as showtext does not work well with RStudio built-in graphics device   https   github com yixuan showtext issues 7   https   journal r-project org archive 2015-1 qiu pdf    x11    on Linux  or  quartz    on Mac OS windows    myFont1  lt -  quot Montserrat quot  myFont2  lt -  quot Roboto quot  myFont3  lt -  quot Palatino quot   library ggplot2   a  lt - ggplot mtcars  aes x   wt  y   mpg        geom point       ggtitle  quot Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars quot       xlab  quot Weight  x1000 lb  quot     ylab  quot Miles per Gallon quot       theme text   element text size   16  family   myFont1       annotate  quot text quot   4  30  label    Palatino Linotype              family   myFont3  size   10      annotate  quot text quot   1  11  label    Roboto   hjust   0             family   myFont2  size   10       On-screen device print a        Save to PNG  ggsave  quot plot showtext png quot   plot   a          type    cairo          width   6  height   6  dpi   150        Save to PDF ggsave  quot plot showtext pdf quot   plot   a          device   cairo pdf         width   6  height   6  dpi   150        turn showtext off if no longer needed showtext auto FALSE    Edit  another workaround to use showtext in RStudio  Run the following code at the beginning of the R session  source  trace grDevices  png  exit   quote       showtext  showtext begin       print   FALSE   Edit 2  Starting from version 0 9  showtext can work well with the RStudio graphics device  RStudioGD   Simply call showtext auto   in the RStudio session and then the plots will be displayed correctly

User · Answer

To change the font globally for ggplot2 plots  theme set theme gray base size   20  base family    Font Name

User · Answer

You just missed an initialization step I think   You can see what fonts you have available with the command windowsFonts    For example mine looks like this when I started looking at this    gt  windowsFonts    serif  1   TT Times New Roman    sans  1   TT Arial    mono  1   TT Courier New    After intalling the package extraFont and running font import like this  it took like 5 minutes    library extrafont  font import   loadfonts device    win     I had many more available - arguable too many  certainly too many to list here   Then I tried your code   library ggplot2  library extrafont  loadfonts device    win    a  lt - ggplot mtcars  aes x wt  y mpg     geom point       ggtitle  Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars       xlab  Weight  x1000 lb      ylab  Miles per Gallon       theme text element text size 16   family  Comic Sans MS    print a    yielding this     Update   You can find the name of a font you need for the family parameter of element text with the following code snippet    gt  names wf wf   TT Times New Roman     1   serif    And then   library ggplot2  library extrafont  loadfonts device    win    a  lt - ggplot mtcars  aes x wt  y mpg     geom point       ggtitle  Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars       xlab  Weight  x1000 lb      ylab  Miles per Gallon       theme text element text size 16   family  serif    print a    yields

[r] Changing fonts in ggplot2

A simple answer if you don't want to install anything new

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