Changing fonts in ggplot2

Late to the party, but this might be of interest for people looking to add custom fonts to their ggplots inside a shiny app on shinyapps.io.

You can:

1. Place custom font in www directory: e.g. IndieFlower.ttf from here
2. Follow the steps from here

This leads to the following upper section inside the app.R file:

dir.create('~/.fonts')
file.copy("www/IndieFlower.ttf", "~/.fonts")
system('fc-cache -f ~/.fonts')

A full example app can be found here.

You just missed an initialization step I think.

You can see what fonts you have available with the command windowsFonts(). For example mine looks like this when I started looking at this:

> windowsFonts()
$serif
[1] "TT Times New Roman"

$sans
[1] "TT Arial"

$mono
[1] "TT Courier New"

After intalling the package extraFont and running font_import like this (it took like 5 minutes):

library(extrafont)
font_import()
loadfonts(device = "win")

I had many more available - arguable too many, certainly too many to list here.

Then I tried your code:

library(ggplot2)
library(extrafont)
loadfonts(device = "win")

a <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) + geom_point() +
  ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
  xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(text=element_text(size=16,  family="Comic Sans MS"))
print(a)

yielding this:

Update:

You can find the name of a font you need for the family parameter of element_text with the following code snippet:

> names(wf[wf=="TT Times New Roman"])
[1] "serif"

And then:

library(ggplot2)
library(extrafont)
loadfonts(device = "win")

a <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) + geom_point() +
  ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
  xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(text=element_text(size=16,  family="serif"))
print(a)

yields:

A simple answer if you don't want to install anything new

To change all the fonts in your plot plot + theme(text=element_text(family="mono")) Where mono is your chosen font.

List of default font options:

• mono
• sans
• serif
• Courier
• Helvetica
• Times
• AvantGarde
• Bookman
• Helvetica-Narrow
• NewCenturySchoolbook
• Palatino
• URWGothic
• URWBookman
• NimbusMon
• URWHelvetica
• NimbusSan
• NimbusSanCond
• CenturySch
• URWPalladio
• URWTimes
• NimbusRom

R doesn't have great font coverage and, as Mike Wise points out, R uses different names for common fonts.

This page goes through the default fonts in detail.

Another option is to use showtext package which supports more types of fonts (TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, web fonts, etc.) and more graphics devices, and avoids using external software such as Ghostscript.

# install.packages('showtext', dependencies = TRUE)
library(showtext)

Import some Google Fonts

# https://fonts.google.com/featured/Superfamilies
font_add_google("Montserrat", "Montserrat")
font_add_google("Roboto", "Roboto")

Load font from the current search path into showtext

# Check the current search path for fonts
font_paths()    
#> [1] "C:\\Windows\\Fonts"

# List available font files in the search path
font_files()    
#>   [1] "AcadEref.ttf"                                
#>   [2] "AGENCYB.TTF"                           
#> [428] "pala.ttf"                                    
#> [429] "palab.ttf"                                   
#> [430] "palabi.ttf"                                  
#> [431] "palai.ttf"

# syntax: font_add(family = "<family_name>", regular = "/path/to/font/file")
font_add("Palatino", "pala.ttf")

font_families()
#> [1] "sans"         "serif"        "mono"         "wqy-microhei"
#> [5] "Montserrat"   "Roboto"       "Palatino"

## automatically use showtext for new devices
showtext_auto() 

Plot: need to open Windows graphics device as showtext does not work well with RStudio built-in graphics device

# https://github.com/yixuan/showtext/issues/7
# https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2015-1/qiu.pdf
# `x11()` on Linux, or `quartz()` on Mac OS
windows()

myFont1 <- "Montserrat"
myFont2 <- "Roboto"
myFont3 <- "Palatino"

library(ggplot2)

a <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + 
  geom_point() +
  ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
  xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(text = element_text(size = 16, family = myFont1)) +
  annotate("text", 4, 30, label = 'Palatino Linotype',
           family = myFont3, size = 10) +
  annotate("text", 1, 11, label = 'Roboto', hjust = 0,
           family = myFont2, size = 10) 

## On-screen device
print(a) 

## Save to PNG 
ggsave("plot_showtext.png", plot = a, 
       type = 'cairo',
       width = 6, height = 6, dpi = 150)  

## Save to PDF
ggsave("plot_showtext.pdf", plot = a, 
       device = cairo_pdf,
       width = 6, height = 6, dpi = 150)  

## turn showtext off if no longer needed
showtext_auto(FALSE) 

Edit: another workaround to use showtext in RStudio. Run the following code at the beginning of the R session (source)

trace(grDevices::png, exit = quote({
    showtext::showtext_begin()
}), print = FALSE)

Edit 2: Starting from version 0.9, showtext can work well with the RStudio graphics device (RStudioGD). Simply call showtext_auto() in the RStudio session and then the plots will be displayed correctly.