systemfonts

systemfonts is a package that locates installed fonts. It uses the system-native libraries on Mac (CoreText) and Linux (FontConfig), and uses Freetype to parse the fonts in the registry on Windows.

Installation

systemfonts is available from CRAN using install.packages('systemfonts'). It is however still under development and you can install the development version using devtools.

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('r-lib/systemfonts')

Examples

The main use of this package is to locate font files based on family and style:

library(systemfonts)

match_fonts('Avenir', italic = TRUE)
#>                               path index features
#> 1 /System/Library/Fonts/Avenir.ttc     1

This function returns the path to the file holding the font, as well as the 0-based index of the font in the file.

It is also possible to get a data.frame of all available fonts:

system_fonts()
#> # A tibble: 916 × 9
#>    path                   index name  family style weight width italic monospace
#>    <chr>                  <int> <chr> <chr>  <chr> <ord>  <ord> <lgl>  <lgl>    
#>  1 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Dash  ultra… norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#>  2 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Bold  bold   norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#>  3 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Bold… bold   norm… TRUE   FALSE    
#>  4 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Ital… normal norm… TRUE   FALSE    
#>  5 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Light light  norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#>  6 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Ligh… light  norm… TRUE   FALSE    
#>  7 /Users/thomas/fonts/Q…     0 Quic… Quick… Regu… normal norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#>  8 /Users/thomas/fonts/R…     0 Rubi… Rubik… Regu… normal norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#>  9 /System/Library/Fonts…     2 Rock… Rockw… Bold  bold   norm… FALSE  FALSE    
#> 10 /Users/thomas/Library…     0 Open… Open … Ligh… normal norm… TRUE   FALSE    
#> # ℹ 906 more rows

Further, you can query additional information about fonts and specific glyphs, if that is of interest using the font_info() and glyph_info() functions.

Custom fonts

While the package was created to provide transparent access to fonts installed on the system, it has grown to also provide ways to work with font files not part of the system installation. This is especially beneficial if you are running code on a system where you don’t have administrator rights and need to use a custom font.

systemfonts provide the add_fonts() function which takes a vector of file paths and add these to the lookup database without installing them. Further, systemfonts automatically looks in the ./fonts and ~/fonts folders and adds any font files located there during startup. This means that you can distribute a script along with a fonts directory and have those fonts automatically available during execution of the script.

In addition to the above, systemfonts also provides access to online font repositories such as Google Fonts and can search and download from these, automatically adding the downloaded fonts to the lookup database.

All these functionalities are condensed into a single function, require_font(), which allows you to state a font dependency inside a script. The function will first look for the font on the system, and failing that, will try to fetch it from an online repository. If that fails it will either throw an error or remap the font to another of the developers choosing.

C API

While getting this information in R is nice, the intended use is mostly through compiled code so that graphic devices can easily locate relevant font files etc.

In order to use functions from systemfonts in C(++) code your package should list systemfonts in the LinkingTo field in the DESCRIPTION file. Once this is done you can now #include <systemfonts.h> in your code and use the provided functions. Look into the inst/include/systemfonts.h file to familiarise yourself with the C API.

System Defaults

systemfonts will always try to find a font for you, even if none exist with the given family name or style. How it resolves this is system specific and should not be relied on, but it can be expected that a valid font file is always returned no matter the input.

A few special aliases exist that behaves predictably but system dependent:

• "" and "sans" return Helvetica on Mac, Arial on Windows, and the default sans-serif font on Linux (DejaVu Sans on Ubuntu)
• "serif" return Times on Mac, Times New Roman on Windows, and the default serif font on Linux (DejaVu Serif on Ubuntu)
• "mono" return Courier on Mac, Courier New on Windows, and the default mono font on Linux (DejaVu Mono on Ubuntu)
• "emoji" return Apple Color Emoji on Mac, Segoe UI Emoji on Windows, and the default emoji font on Linux (Noto Color on Ubuntu)

Code of Conduct

Please note that the ‘systemfonts’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.