While R gives you absolute control over your graphics, you’ll quickly find that it’s not that great with fonts and customized text. The extrafont package isn’t exactly straight forward to use, so let’s go over it!
library('ggplot2')
## Registered S3 methods overwritten by 'ggplot2':
## method from
## [.quosures rlang
## c.quosures rlang
## print.quosures rlang
library('extrafont')
## Registering fonts with R
Importing Fonts
The first time you use extrafont, you’ll have to run this sequence of commands:
font_import()
loadfonts()
This imports all of the custom fonts you have saved to your local machine so that they’re usable with R. If you want additional fonts, you’ll have to load them onto your computer and then re-run the above commands. To view all of the fonts that are now available for use, use the fonts function.
fonts()
## [1] ".Keyboard" "System Font"
## [3] ".SF NS Rounded" "Andale Mono"
## [5] "Apple Braille" "AppleMyungjo"
## [7] "Arial Black" "Arial"
## [9] "Arial Narrow" "Arial Rounded MT Bold"
## [11] "Arial Unicode MS" "Bodoni Ornaments"
## [13] "Bodoni 72 Smallcaps" ""
## [15] "Brush Script MT" "Comic Sans MS"
## [17] "Courier New" "DIN Alternate"
## [19] "DIN Condensed" "Georgia"
## [21] "Impact" "Khmer Sangam MN"
## [23] "Lao Sangam MN" "Luminari"
## [25] "Microsoft Sans Serif" "Tahoma"
## [27] "Times New Roman" "Trattatello"
## [29] "Trebuchet MS" "Verdana"
## [31] "Webdings" "Wingdings"
## [33] "Wingdings 2" "Wingdings 3"
## [35] "Winter Calligraphy"
Custom Font Examples
R defaults to the font thats marked “”. But now we have a lot more variety! Let’s check a few of them out. Here’s how you choose a custom font with a base R plot.
plot(rnorm(10), 1:10, main = 'This is the Impact font', family = 'Impact')
And here’s how you choose a custom font in ggplot2.
ggplot() +
geom_point(aes(rnorm(10), 1:10)) +
ggtitle('This is my favorite font') +
theme(text = element_text(size = 22, family = 'Winter Calligraphy'))
Annotations
Sometimes you need to add text that doesn’t neatly fit into R’s pre-defined labels. You can annotate your ggplot2 graphic with custom fonts as well! Note that the annotate function doesn’t just annotate text, you can overlay circles, shapes, shading, and more.
set.seed(1)
ggplot() +
geom_point(aes(rnorm(10), 1:10)) +
annotate('text', x = -0.25, y = 3, label = 'This is the (il)Luminari', family = 'Luminari', size = 14)
Mathematical Formulas
As a student of statistics, I often need to plot probability distributions. Here’s how to include the mathematical formulas that produce them.
In base R:
curve(dnorm, from=-3, to=3, main="Normal Distribution", family = 'Winter Calligraphy', cex.main = 2)
text(x=0, y=0.1, cex=1.5, expression(italic(y == frac(1, sqrt(2 * pi)) *
e ^ {-frac(x^2, 2)} )), family = 'Brush Script MT')
With ggplot2:
ggplot(data.frame(x=c(-3,3)), aes(x=x)) + ggtitle("The Normal Distribution") +
stat_function(fun=dnorm, geom="line") +
theme_bw() +
theme(text=element_text(family="Comic Sans MS"),
plot.title = element_text(size = 28, face = "bold")) +
annotate("text", x=0, y=.1, label="italic(y == frac(1, sqrt(2 * pi)) * e ^ {-frac(x^2, 2)} )",
parse=TRUE, family="Comic Sans MS",)
Embedding Fonts in Export
If you’re looking to export your new, beautiful custom-font graphic as a pdf, you’ll have to embed the font with the file for it to work! Kind of stupid, right?
Anyways, here are the simple steps to make sure your pdf looks just as
it should when someone else opens it on a different computer. You save
the graphic using your favorite method, then you run the embed_fonts
function.
ggsave('my_file.pdf', favorite_plot, width = 5, height = 4)
embed_fonts('my_file.pdf', outfile = 'my_file_embedded.pdf')
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading.
- Fisher
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