Where did you get the idea that Helvetica was a Windows font family name? (It is a Linotype trademark font name.) It is rarely seen on Windows, so attempts to use it almost always end up with a font substitution, often to Arial which is already the default family in win.metafile(). That will be equally true for most PDF viewers (but Acrobat's substitution will be much less faithful).

See Wikipedia and http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html for the history and differences between Helvetica and Arial. You can (or could) buy Helvetica from Adobe for Windows. (There was a film about Helvetica for its 50th anniversary, shown on BBC TV.)

You can only specify font families in a device-specific way, apart from the device-independent values of "serif", "sans" and "mono". So pdf() and the windows() set of devices do it differently, and their help pages do point you to the appropriate help.

?win.metafile points you to ?windowsFonts, which has all the details (except a list of possible families, since that depends on what you have installed under Windows, and the default for that depends on the version and language of Windows). If you have Helvetica installed, ?windowsFonts tells you (in principle) how to add it as a font family.

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Simon Pickett wrote:

Hi all,

I recently discovered how great win.metafile is for getting high resolution graphics into word.

Be careful: Word has been adept at mangling metafiles on insertion, and even more so if you attempt to edit them.

Having problems with specifying families though...

#pdf works fine
pdf("test.pdf",width=14,height=9)
par(family="Helvetica")
plot(1:10)
text(4,4,"trial")
dev.off()
windows
     2

#metafile doesnt like helvetica family
win.metafile("test.wmf",width=14,height=9)
par(family="Helvetica")
plot(1:10)
There were 12 warnings (use warnings() to see them)
text(4,4,"trial")
Warning message:
In text.default(4, 4, "trial") :
 Font family not found in Windows font database
dev.off()
windows
     2

Trawled through messages on here and read Rdegva but couldnt find the answer. Are there any user friendly windows user guides about all this?

R 2.8.1
Windows XP 2003

Cheers, Si.

Dr. Simon Pickett
Research Ecologist
Land Use Department
Terrestrial Unit
British Trust for Ornithology
The Nunnery
Thetford
Norfolk
IP242PU
01842750050

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