Using systemfonts to handle fonts in R

systemfonts is designed to give R a modern text rendering stack. That’s unfortunately impossible without coordination with the graphics device, which means that to use all these features you need a supported graphics device. There are currently two options:

You might notice there’s currently a big hole in this workflow: PDFs. This is something we plan to work on in the future.

A systemfonts based workflow

With all that said, how do you actually use systemfonts to use custom fonts in your plots? First, you’ll need to use ragg or svglite.

Using ragg

While there is no way to unilaterally make ragg::agg_png() the default everywhere, it’s possible to get close:

Positron: recent versions automatically use ragg for the plot pane if it’s installed.
RStudio IDE: set “AGG” as the backend under Global Options > General > Graphics.
ggplot2::ggsave(): ragg will be automatically used for raster output if installed.

R Markdown and Quarto: you need to set the dev option to "ragg_png". You can either do this with code:

#| include: false
knitr::opts_chunk$set(dev = "ragg_png")

Or in Quarto, you can set it in the yaml metadata:

---
title: "My Document"
format: html
knitr:
  opts_chunk:
    dev: "ragg_png"
---

If you want to use a font installed on your computer, you’re done!

grid::grid.text(
  "Spectral 🎉",
  gp = grid::gpar(fontfamily = "Spectral", fontface = 2, fontsize = 30)
)

Or, if using ggplot2

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(na.omit(penguins)) +
  geom_point(aes(x = bill_len, y = body_mass, colour = species)) +
  labs(x = "Bill Length", y = "Body Mass", colour = "Species") +
  theme_minimal(base_family = "Spectral")

If the results don’t look as you expect, you can use various systemfonts helpers to diagnose the problem:

systemfonts::match_fonts("Spectral", weight = "bold")
#> # A tibble: 1 × 4
#>   path                                         index features   variations
#>   <chr>                                        <int> <list>     <list>    
#> 1 /Users/thomas/Library/Fonts/Spectral 700.ttf     0 <font_ftr> <fnt_vrtn>
systemfonts::font_fallback("🎉", family = "Spectral", weight = "bold")
#>                                          path index
#> 1 /System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttc     0

If you want to see all the fonts that are available for use, you can use systemfonts::system_fonts()

systemfonts::system_fonts()