Add Font to R That Is Not in Extrafonts Library

Add font to R that is not in extrafonts library

First you get the font you want and install it on your system. Nothing to do with R. Test if the font works by checking in any regular program like MS Word or something.

Then open R, load extrafont package and import the font that you installed. I think it only works with .ttf fonts for now.

library(extrafont)
font_import(pattern="Roboto")

If this works, then this step will add those fonts to the extrafontdb. You will see something like this...

> font_import(pattern="Roboto",prompt=FALSE)
Scanning ttf files in C:\windows\Fonts ...
Extracting .afm files from .ttf files...
C:\Windows\Fonts\Roboto-Black.ttf => C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/metrics/Roboto-Black
C:\Windows\Fonts\Roboto-BlackItalic.ttf => C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/metrics/Roboto-BlackItalic
...
C:\Windows\Fonts\RobotoCondensed-Regular.ttf => C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/metrics/RobotoCondensed-Regular
Found FontName for 30 fonts.
Scanning afm files in C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/metrics
Writing font table in C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/fontmap/fonttable.csv
Writing Fontmap to C:/R/R-3.5.1/library/extrafontdb/fontmap/Fontmap...

This is a one time thing. Once imported, it is available within R from then on. All you have to do is run below.

library(extrafont)
# for windows
windowsFonts(sans="Roboto")
loadfonts(device="win")
loadfonts(device="postscript")

Now the defaults should have changed.

plot(x=1:5,y=1:5)

ggplot has base_family which needs to be changed and family argument for text geoms.

library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(data.frame(x=1:5,y=1:5),aes(x,y))+
  geom_point()+
  geom_text(aes(label=y),nudge_x=0.5,family="Roboto")+
  theme_bw(base_family="Roboto")
p

Exporting raster images should work too.

ggsave("plot.png",p)

PDFs are a pain. They have an extra family argument. There is also something about embedding and stuff. See link below.

ggsave("plot.pdf",p,family="Roboto")

All the info you need is here.

Adding Fonts to R using extrafont or showtext libraries (on Mac via FontBook)

In Font Book > Preferences, by switching the preference of the fonts from User to Computer, it ensures that the fonts install into the fonts folder. This solved my problem.

Cannot import fonts into R

The best solution to my knowledge is showtext and sysfonts. First, add the font to the session:

# directly from google fonts
sysfonts::font_add_google("Roboto Condensed")
# or add an arbitrary font with
sysfonts::font_add("Roboto Condensed", regular = "RobotoCondensed-Regular.ttf")

Once this is done, simply load showtext and run showtext_auto() once to activate it (you need to repeat add_font* and showtext_auto every session):

library(ggplot2)
library(showtext)

showtext_auto()
ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(x="Fuel efficiency (mpg)", y="Weight (tons)",
       title="Seminal ggplot2 scatterplot example",
       subtitle="A plot that is only useful for demonstration purposes",
       caption="Brought to you by the letter 'g'") + 
  hrbrthemes::theme_ipsum_rc()

^{Created on 2022-03-22 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

You can also try to make the font available permanently. But it seems to be hit and miss. Theoretically, you need to install the font into C:\Windows\Fonts, which you can do by 1) unzip the fonts, 2) right click and "install for all users". If you install the fonts in a different way, there is a good chance Windows will only put a link into C:\Windows\Fonts, which R can't deal with.

You can check available fonts with:

fonts_df <- sysfonts::font_files()
View(fonts_df)

This works for most fonts in my experience but with Roboto, I still had no luck for some reason. add_font* seems to be the best way to go for now.

How can I resolve the No Font Name issue when importing fonts into R using extrafont?

As it was mentioned by @Moritz Schwarz, the problem is traced to Rttf2pt1.

According to a solution proposed here, downgrading it to 1.3.8 will fix the problem:

library(extrafont)
library(remotes)
remotes::install_version("Rttf2pt1", version = "1.3.8")
extrafont::font_import()

Downloading Fonts in R: 'No fontName. Skipping'

Using the following code worked when I downloaded Rtools40.

library(extrafont)

library(remotes)

remotes::install_version("Rttf2pt1", version = "1.3.8")

extrafont::font_import()

Verify font availability in R

You're already using the extrafont package so you can use fonts() to see the registered fonts. To check if a particular font is available you can do:

library(extrafont)

"metropolis" %in% fonts()

[1] FALSE

How to solve the error status 5 in extrafont?

I suspect this is related to issues with Rttf2pt1 (upon which extrafont depends) as described here and here. Suggested solution which worked for me is to downgrade Rttf2pt1 as below:

remove.packages("Rttf2pt1")   
remotes::install_version("Rttf2pt1", version = "1.3.8") 

Importing the xkcd fonts in R (for xkcd package) on windows

Here is the solution I reached.

Download necessary packages.

install.packages("extrafont","remotes","xkcd")
library(extrafont)
library(remotes)

One of the problem is the error message In system2(ttf2pt1, c(args, shQuote(ttfiles[i]), shQuote(tmpfiles[i])), : running command [...] that is resolved by downgrading Rttf2pt1 to version 1.3.8

remotes::install_version("Rttf2pt1", version = "1.3.8")

Download the font and be sure it is in the working directory (it should be).

download.file("http://simonsoftware.se/other/xkcd.ttf", dest = "xkcd.ttf", mode = "wb")

The original description to import the font does not work (see the vignette("xkcd-intro"), the path has to be redirected to the working directory.

font_import(paths = getwd(), pattern = "[X/x]kcd", prompt = FALSE)

Loading the font and the xkcd package should now work.

loadfonts(device = "win")
library(xkcd)

The package xkcd and its functions should not work properly.

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