Want to change the font used in your R plots? I got a quite simple solution that works on Mac OS.

 You need the function 'quartzFonts'. With this function, you can define additional font families to use in your R base graphic plots. The default font families are 'sans', 'serif' and 'mono'.

 Let's say, I want to define a new font family with the 'Avenir' font. All I have to do is:

 quartzFonts(avenir = c("Avenir Book", "Avenir Black", "Avenir Book Oblique", 
        "Avenir Black Oblique"))

 The first element of the vector is the normal face, then bold face, then italic face, then bold-italic font face. The bold face is used for the title of the plots, for example.
        
Now, R knows how to interpret the font family 'avenir'. Let's try this:

 par(family = 'sans') # the default of R
plot(rnorm(100), rnorm(100), main = "A plot.")

# Now, do the same with the new 'Avenir' font family
par(family = 'avenir') # the call to 'quartzFonts' above has to be executed first
plot(rnorm(100), rnorm(100), main = "Another plot.")
You might wonder where you can get the font names from. Well, simply open your Mac OS "Font Book" (it's called "Schriftsammlung" in German) and look at the title of the font that is written in grey over the sample of the font.


I defined a function '.define.fonts' in my .Rprofile file. So, each time R starts up, I have an invisible function '.define.fonts' available in the environment. If I want to use one of the two alternative fonts, I can just call '.define.fonts()'. Here's the function:

 .define.fonts <- function () {
    quartzFonts(avenir = c("Avenir Book", "Avenir Black", "Avenir Book Oblique", 
        "Avenir Black Oblique"), helvetica = c("Helvetica Neue Light", 
        "Helvetica Neue Bold", "Helvetica Neue Light Italic", 
        "Helvetica Neue Bold Italic"))
}

 You might need to change the names of the 'helvetica' family if you run a non-German Mac OS.
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Labels: family font function Mac OS plot visualization
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  1. This was a great blog post, thanks! I really like Helvetica Light. When I try to save my graph to a pdf, though, the text doesn't show up or I get an error (depending on how I try to save it). Do you happen to know a fix for that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies

    1. Hey Anne, thanks for your reply. You are right: It does not work with PDFs and the font association with pdfFonts() works differently. However, I found a nice package that might solve your problem: It is called "extrafont" (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/extrafont/README.html).

      I successfully adapted the fonts used in PDF output with the following commands:

      install.packages('extrafont')
      library(extrafont)
      font_import() # This takes some time! But you only have to do it once.
      loadfonts()
      fonts()
      pdf("test.pdf", family = "Impact")
      plot(rnorm(100), xlab = "FONT test test öäü")
      dev.off()

      pdf("test2.pdf", family = "Luminari")
      plot(rnorm(100), xlab = "FONT test test öäü")
      dev.off()

      pdf("test3.pdf", family = "Cambria")
      plot(rnorm(100), xlab = "FONT test test öäü")
      dev.off()

      Helvetica wasn't imported by the package, though :(

      Delete

    2. Hi Sascha,

      Thanks a lot for sharing this. I did eventually get it to work with Helvetica Light, though it wasn't very straightforward. I had to manually change the name of the font family in a .csv file somewhere (sorry I can't remember where). I think this is only an issue for fonts that are nested under another name (like Helvetica Light underneath Helvetica).

      Delete

  2. font family 'avenir' not found in PostScript font database

    How do I deal with that? I am trying the save plots as .pdf files.

    This is my code:
    pdf("tmp/plot1.pdf",width = 6.5,height = 7.5)
    quartzFonts(avenir = c("Avenir Book", "Avenir Black", "Avenir Book Oblique",
    "Avenir Black Oblique"), helvetica = c("Helvetica Neue Light",
    "Helvetica Neue Bold", "Helvetica Neue Light Italic",
    "Helvetica Neue Bold Italic"))

    plot_data<-c(0.4,0.4,0.2)
    names(plot_data)<-c("A","B","C")
    par(family = 'avenir') # the call to 'quartzFonts' above has to be executed first
    pie(plot_data,las=2,main=NA,cex=0.7, init.angle =0,lty = 1,xlab="")
    title("NORMAL",line=-1)
    title(xlab="abc", line=-1)
    dev.off()

    ReplyDelete
    Replies

    1. Hi Gurkan, thanks for your comment. To be honest, I don't know how much of the R-internal plotting engine changed since I posted this. But this seems to work:

      quartzFonts(avenir = c("Avenir Book", "Avenir Black", "Avenir Book Oblique",
      "Avenir Black Oblique"), helvetica = c("Helvetica Neue Light",
      "Helvetica Neue Bold", "Helvetica Neue Light Italic",
      "Helvetica Neue Bold Italic"))

      plot_data<-c(0.4,0.4,0.2)
      names(plot_data)<-c("A","B","C")
      pie(plot_data,las=2,main=NA,cex=0.7, init.angle =0,lty = 1,xlab="", family = "avenir")
      title("NORMAL",line=-1, family = "avenir")
      title(xlab="abc", line=-1, family = "avenir")

      As you can see, I deleted the par(family = "avenir") call and put the 'family' argument in each call. This works on my system.

      Delete

Hi all, this is just an announcement.

I am moving Rcrastinate to a blogdown-based solution and am therefore leaving blogger.com. If you're interested in the new setup and how you could do the same yourself, please check out the all shiny and new Rcrastinate over at

http://rcrastinate.rbind.io/

In my first post over there, I am giving a short summary on how I started the whole thing. I hope that the new Rcrastinate is also integrated into R-bloggers soon.

Thanks for being here, see you over there.

Alright, seems like this is developing into a blog where I am increasingly investigating my own music listening habits.

Recently, I've come across the analyzelastfm package by Sebastian Wolf. I used it to download my complete listening history from Last.FM for the last ten years. That's a complete dataset from 2009 to 2018 with exactly 65,356 "scrobbles" (which is the word Last.FM uses to describe one instance of a playback of a song).
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Giddy up, giddy it up

Wanna move into a fool's gold room

With my pulse on the animal jewels

Of the rules that you choose to use to get loose

With the luminous moves

Bored of these limits, let me get, let me get it like

Wow!

When it comes to surreal lyrics and videos, I'm always thinking of Beck. Above, I cited the beginning of the song "Wow" from his latest album "Colors" which has received rather mixed reviews. In this post, I want to show you what I have done with Spotify's API.

Click here for the interactive visualization

If you're interested in the visualisation of networks or graphs, you might've heard of the great package "visNetwork". I think it's a really great package and I love playing around with it. The scenarios of graph-based analyses are many and diverse: whenever you can describe your data in terms of "outgoing" and "receiving" entities, a graph-based analysis and/or visualisation is possible.
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Here is some updated R code from my previous post. It doesn't throw any warnings when importing tracks with and without heart rate information. Also, it is easier to distinguish types of tracks now (e.g., when you want to plot runs and rides separately). Another thing I changed: You get very basic information on the track when you click on it (currently the name of the track and the total length).

Have fun and leave a comment if you have any questions.
3

So, Strava's heatmap made quite a stir the last few weeks. I decided to give it a try myself. I wanted to create some kind of "personal heatmap" of my runs, using Strava's API. Also, combining the data with Leaflet maps allows us to make use of the beautiful map tiles supported by Leaflet and to zoom and move the maps around - with the runs on it, of course.

So, let's get started. First, you will need an access token for Strava's API.

I've been using the ggplot2 package a lot recently. When creating a legend or tick marks on the axes, ggplot2 uses the levels of a character or factor vector. Most of the time, I am working with coded variables that use some abbreviation of the "true" meaning (e.g. "f" for female and "m" for male or single characters for some single character for a location: "S" for Stuttgart and "M" for Mannheim).

In my plots, I don't want these codes but the full name of the level.

It's been a while since I had the opportunity to post something on music. Let's get back to that.

I got my hands on some song lyrics by a range of artists. (I have an R script to download all lyrics for a given artist from a lyrics website.
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Lately, I got the chance to play around with Shiny and Leaflet a lot - and it is really fun! So I decided to catch up on an old post of mine and build a Shiny application where you can upload your own GPX files and plot them directly in the browser.

Of course, you will need some GPX file to try it out. You can get an example file here (you gonna need to save it in a .gpx file with a text editor, though). Also, the Shiny application will always plot the first track saved in a GPX file.
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