I’m preparing a manuscript for PLOS ONE and saw this in the figure guidelines:
Figure text must be in Arial font, between 8 and 12 point.
Easy, I thought. Just a matter of specifying a font family in the device I print to.
Think again.
Apparently, R does not support using different font definitions. Of course I’m
not the first person to encounter this problem. In an excellent post by
Gavin Simpson he explains how to come around this, and even to embed fonts
in PDFs printed by R. In short, take a look at the extrafont package.
It enables you to use fonts on your system in your R figures.
To get this to work properly, I had to specify one single directory to look
when importing the fonts in since I apparently had multiple copies of Arial
on my system (Mac OSX 10.9). This can be done easily by using
font_import(path=c('/Library/Fonts'), recursive=FALSE) to ensure that only
one copy is used.