Putting Google Fonts in R graphs

Inspiration for this post

I’ve been working on creating a visualization cookbook for R graphics (check out this great example from the BBC to see what I’m eventually going for). As part of this process, I wanted to be able to change the font of my plots to Source Sans Pro, which is a Google font.

sysfonts package

The first step here was to install and load the sysfonts package:

library(sysfonts)

Downloading font to your computer

As I learned from this super helpful GitHub repo, you need to install the font on your system as well as within R.

font_add_google

Next, I used the font_add_google function from sysfonts to download the Source Sans Pro fonts:

font_add_google("Source Sans Pro")

If you want to install a different Google Font, you can run font_families_google() to see the list of family names of fonts currently available in Google Fonts:

head(font_families_google())

## [1] "ABeeZee"       "Abel"          "Abhaya Libre"  "Abril Fatface"
## [5] "Aclonica"      "Acme"

Example

To continue with my Lego theme, I’ll demonstrate using this font on data from the legocolors package. We can make the following graph of approximate lego brick availability based on the year a brick was released (colored by the brick color!):

library(legocolors)

## Warning: package 'legocolors' was built under R version 3.5.2

library(ggplot2)

## Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 3.5.2

ggplot(legocolors, aes(x = year_released, y = bl_bp, colour = hex)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_color_manual(values = legocolors$hex) +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(legend.position = "none", text = element_text(family = "Source Sans Pro"), plot.title = element_text(face = "bold")) +
  labs(x = "Year released", y = "Brick availability", title = "Lego availability", subtitle = "All of the text is now in Source Sans Pro!")

## Warning: Removed 3 rows containing missing values (geom_point).

Troubleshooting

This process is a little bit finicky, so there are certain errors that crop up frequently. For me, just restarting RStudio and/or my computer (or updating the computer, if necessary) has solved these. The most common errors are No font could be found for family "Source Sans Pro" and "Error in grid.Call(C_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, : polygon edge not found", both of which relate to R not being able to find the font. If the font is indeed installed on your computer (you can check this in Font Book, for a Mac), then restarting things should help R find the font.