Unicode Characters in Ggplot2 PDF Output

Unicode Characters in ggplot2 PDF Output

As Ben suggested, cairo_pdf() is your friend. It also allows you to embed non-postscript fonts (i.e. TTF/OTF) in the PDF via the family argument (crucial if you don't happen to have any postscript fonts that contain the glyphs you want to use). For example:

library(ggplot2)
cairo_pdf("example.pdf", family="DejaVu Sans")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()

...gives a PDF that looks like this:

See also this question; though it doesn't look directly relevant from the title, there is a lot in there about getting fonts to do what you want in R.

EDIT per request in comments, here is the windows-specific code:

library(ggplot2)
windowsFonts(myCustomWindowsFontName=windowsFont("DejaVu Sans"))
cairo_pdf("example.pdf", family="myCustomWindowsFontName")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()

To use the base graphics command cairo_pdf() it should suffice to just define your font family with the windowsFonts() command first, as shown above. Of course, make sure you use a font that you actually have on your system, and that actually has all the glyphs that you need.

TThe instructions about DLL files in the comments below are what I had to do to get the Cairo() and CairoPDF() commands in library(Cairo) to work on Windows. Then:

library(ggplot2)
library(Cairo)
windowsFonts(myCustomWindowsFontName=windowsFont("DejaVu Sans"))
CairoPDF("example.pdf")
par(family="myCustomWindowsFontName")
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data=iris, main="Aʙᴄᴅᴇғɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")
dev.off()

Save unicode characters to .pdf in R

This seems to work on my mac:

library(tidyverse)

quartz(type = 'pdf', file = 'test.pdf')

ggplot() +
    geom_point(data = data.frame(x=1, y=1), aes(x,y), shape = "\u2191") +
    geom_point(data = data.frame(x=2, y=2), aes(x,y), shape = "\u2020")

Using the suggestion from here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44548861/1827

comfortable way to use unicode characters in a ggplot graph

Try

library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(df, aes(x=date, y=value)) 
p <- p + geom_line()
p + ggtitle(sprintf('5\u03BCg'))
library(Cairo)
ggsave("newfile.pdf", device=cairo_pdf)

data

set.seed(42) 
df <- data.frame(date = 1:10 , value = cumsum(runif(10 , max = 10)) )

Include unicode in ggplot in .rmd, render in multiple formats

It's (likely) a graphics device issue. You can set a different device using chunk options. If you have the {ragg} package, this usually gives me reliable results.

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE,
                      dev = "ragg_png")
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
```

You can also add dpi = 150 to the options if you find that the graphics are too coarse.

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