Changing fonts in ggplot2

Question

Once upon a time, I changed my ggplot2 font using using windowsFonts(Times=windowsFont(\"TT Times New Roman\")) to change it. Now I can\'t get it

Answer 1

You just missed an initialization step I think.

You can see what fonts you have available with the command windowsFonts(). For example mine looks like this when I started looking at this:

> windowsFonts()
$serif
[1] "TT Times New Roman"

$sans
[1] "TT Arial"

$mono
[1] "TT Courier New"

After intalling the package extraFont and running font_import like this (it took like 5 minutes):

library(extrafont)
font_import()
loadfonts(device = "win")

I had many more available - arguable too many, certainly too many to list here.

Then I tried your code:

library(ggplot2)
library(extrafont)
loadfonts(device = "win")

a <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) + geom_point() +
  ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
  xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(text=element_text(size=16,  family="Comic Sans MS"))
print(a)

yielding this:

Update:

You can find the name of a font you need for the family parameter of element_text with the following code snippet:

> names(wf[wf=="TT Times New Roman"])
[1] "serif"

And then:

library(ggplot2)
library(extrafont)
loadfonts(device = "win")

a <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) + geom_point() +
  ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
  xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
  theme(text=element_text(size=16,  family="serif"))
print(a)

yields: