[R] X11 font at size 6 could not be loaded

Wittner, Ben, Ph.D. Wittner.Ben at mgh.harvard.edu
Tue Jan 22 21:54:51 CET 2008


I recently upgraded my OS to Fedora 8 from Red Hat Enterprise Work Station 3.
Before I upgraded certain operations would produce a warning to the effect that
a desired font was not available so one had been substituted, which was okay.
After the upgrade to Fedora 8, the plotting operation halts midway through and I
get the following error message:
"X11 font at size 6 could not be loaded"
This is not okay, because plotting does not complete.

I've also gotten that message regarding size 8.

In R, if it do getOption("X11fonts") I get
[1] "-adobe-helvetica-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
[2] "-adobe-symbol-medium-r-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

If from bash I do xlsfonts, I see that I have fonts that match, but the smallest
seem to be 11 points:
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--11-80-100-100-p-60-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--11-80-100-100-p-60-iso8859-1

If I run the same program on my Fedora 8 system but use an X server on a Windows
PC (Hummingbird X server), I have no problem.

If I can't fix this, this is a disaster for me because some of the most common
things I do are afflicted by this problem.

Can anyone help me get adobe-helvetica 6 and 8 point fonts onto my system or
give any other advice?

Thanks very much.
-Ben

p.s., I also tried in R
options(X11fonts="-misc-fixed-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*")
but that resulted in
Error in X11(display, width, height, pointsize, if (is.null(gamma)) 1 else
gamma,  : 
  invalid 'fonts' value
when I tried to plot.

p.p.s, here's my version information
platform       i686-pc-linux-gnu           
arch           i686                        
os             linux-gnu                   
system         i686, linux-gnu             
status                                     
major          2                           
minor          6.1                         
year           2007                        
month          11                          
day            26                          
svn rev        43537                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 2.6.1 (2007-11-26)

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