Problems with PDF fonts generated with ggsave under windows when linking in Illustrator

2
votes

I run into problems with embedded (or not embedded?) fonts in PDFs of ggplots created with ggsave and linked into illustrator files, for some reason on windows only.

For my workflow I link plots into illustrator where I create figures with several plots. I don't embed the plots because in case something changes in R the plots are automatically updated when Illustrator is reopened. So the problem is that when trying to save such files I always get an error message that saving is not possible because the Font "^1" could not be embedded. I can save the illustrator files when I disable PDF compatibility but cannot save them as PDF, which is what I need.

I don't get this problem if I use ggsave(plot, device=cairo_pdf), but with cairo_pdfI run into other problems (e.g. with geom_rangeframe). In previous posts I read about an issue with the dingbats or AdobePiStd font, but using ggsave(plot, useDingpats=F) does not solve it. Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?

1
pdfggplot2fontsadobe-illustrator
Your update seem to be an answer to your question. You can answer your own question then mark it correct after a few days - cybernetic.nomad

1 Answers

0
votes

After further research I could solve the problem with the embedFonts function. The the problem seems to be that the fonts are not embedded by default. I wrote a small function to use instead of ggsave to automatically embed the fonts into the same PDF file:

ggsave_embed<-function(fileN, ...){
ggsave(fileN, ...)
embedFonts(file=fileN, outfile = fileN)
}
# example usage:
ggsave_embed("myfile.pdf", myPlot)