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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

systemfonts 1.3.3

  • register_font() and register_variant() gain a variation argument that lets you attach variable font axis coordinates (a font_variation() object) to a registered font, making it possible to register a variable font at specific axis settings under a new name. When a registered font declares a wght or wdth axis, requests for in-between weight/width values are served by the registered font with the requested coordinate, rather than bypassing the registry. registry_fonts() gains a variations column reflecting the registered settings

  • On Linux, the symbol alias is now resolved by probing a preference list of fonts with correct Unicode cmaps (DejaVu Sans, OpenSymbol, Symbola) before falling back to fontconfig’s symbol match. Fontconfig often resolves symbol to URW’s Standard Symbols PS, whose cmap maps e.g. U+00D7 (×) to a dot operator, breaking plotmath output (r-lib/ragg#213)

  • detect_emoji_embedding() in the C API now returns a third state (2) for text-presentation-default emoji codepoints (e.g. U+2199) that lack a variation selector and are not covered by the primary font. Consumers can shape these with normal font fallback and only use the emoji font as a last resort, fixing text characters such as arrows being replaced by color emoji (r-lib/ragg#217)

  • scan_local_fonts() now only considers files with a known font extension, fixing slow package loading when the scan directories (./fonts, ~/fonts) contain many non-font files (r-lib/ragg#210)

  • The C API now provides the horizontal bearings of a glyph through the new glyph_metrics_with_bearing() function (#154)

  • glyph_bitmap() now falls back to the nearest bitmap strike that actually carries a glyph when the requested size yields an empty bitmap in a non-scalable font (e.g. Apple Color Emoji glyphs added in later Unicode versions, which lack artwork in the mid-size strikes), instead of returning an empty bitmap

  • Added math alias to select a font suitable for equations (has math table support).

  • Fixed get_glyph_bitmap() returning transposed rasters and writing out of bounds for color (BGRA) glyphs.

  • Fixed a typo in the optical_sizing font variation renaming optz-> opsz

  • Extensive hardening of the C/C++ code: fixed a heap corruption when a font lacks a PostScript name, a stack overflow in string_widths_dev() and string_metrics_dev() with long family names, cache corruption after failed font loads, resource leaks on macOS and in variable font handling, and out-of-bounds reads on empty or malformed inputs. Variation axis settings are now applied more reliably (hash collisions fixed, defaults restored, invalid values rejected with an error)

  • Removed the unused and broken DirectWrite-based Windows font manager

  • require_font() now checks reachability of the actual font repositories instead of probing 8.8.8.8, which is blocked on many corporate networks (#156)

  • Fixed compilation against FreeType < 2.9 which lacks FT_Done_MM_Var() (#149, #155)

systemfonts 1.3.2

CRAN release: 2026-03-05

  • Fixed a compilation error when compiling against very old versions of Freetype
  • Avoid compiler warnings when comparing doubles to enum
  • Work around broken PingFangUI.ttc on macOS (#147)
  • Guard against zero-length input (#151)

systemfonts 1.3.1

CRAN release: 2025-10-01

  • Fixed a sanitizer issue with converting variation axis names to tags
  • Avoid spurious build issues on old macOS systems
  • Avoid writing font files to the user directory during test

systemfonts 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2025-09-30

  • Fixed a bug in the URL generation for Google Font imports
  • Added support for Bunny Fonts imports (#132)
  • Begin deprecation of bold argument in favour of weight throughout package
  • Improve messaging in require_font()
  • Fonts are automatically added to the session when an import is created (#131)
  • Fixed a bug in converting font weights as reported by macOS into ISO-style weight used by systemfonts and FreeType
  • require_font() now better handles lack of internet access
  • Added plot_glyph_stats() to provide visual explanation for various glyph measures
  • font_info() now returns the PostScript name of the font in the name column
  • Added support for variable fonts throughout the package. Other packages will need to be upgraded to take advantage of this. A new function font_variation() can be used to define coords for the variation axes
  • Fixed a bug in webfont download on Windows where fontfiles would become corrupted (#134)
  • Fixed an issue in textshaping where conflicting DLL names resulted in the R process inability to render text if textshaping was loaded first (textshaping#36)
  • Add a way to test if the freetype version matches between systemfonts and another package match
  • Added a name column to the output of glyph_info() to report the name of the glyph is provided by the font
  • Added a charmaps column to the output of font_info() to report the name of the character maps provided by the font
  • Cached faces are now reference counted when they are handed off to another package and it is the other packages’ responsibility to decrement the reference by calling FT_Done_Face() when finished with it.

systemfonts 1.2.3

CRAN release: 2025-04-30

  • Added fonts_as_import() to create stylesheet urls for embedding of fonts in HTML and SVG
  • Added two C-level functions for getting glyph outline and bitmap information

systemfonts 1.2.2

CRAN release: 2025-04-04

  • Fix compilation on macOS when the obj-c++ compiler fails to pick up the right obj-c++ version (#122)
  • add_fonts() now supports urls as well as file paths (#124)

systemfonts 1.2.1

CRAN release: 2025-01-20

  • Fix a memory issue when adding new fonts with add_fonts()
  • Default to not downloading woff2 files from Google Fonts since it is poorly supported on many systems
  • Fixed a bug in get_from_font_squirrel() where the font wasn’t placed in the user specified location

systemfonts 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2025-01-16

  • Providing the font name as the family should now result in better matching
  • Improved the fallback options for Windows so that as many scripts are now covered
  • Add infrastructure to add uninstalled font files to the search path used for font matching
  • Add facilities to download and register fonts from web repositories such as Google Fonts and Font Squirrel
  • Add require_font() that does it’s best to ensure that a given font is available after being called.
  • Added functions for extracting outline and raster representation of glyphs

systemfonts 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2024-05-15

  • match_fonts() have been added as a vectorized and generalized version of match_font(). In the process match_font() has been deprecated in favour of match_fonts()
  • Two internal functions for converting weight and width names to integers have been exported
  • Fix a segfault on macOS when the system encounters a corrupted font collection (#113)

systemfonts 1.0.6

CRAN release: 2024-03-07

systemfonts 1.0.4

CRAN release: 2022-02-11

  • Use Courier New as default mono font on macOS instead of Courier to avoid issues between FreeType and Courier (#105)

systemfonts 1.0.4

CRAN release: 2022-02-11

  • Provide a fallback solution to the setup of the CRAN windows builder so that fonts can be discovered (#87)

systemfonts 1.0.3

CRAN release: 2021-10-13

  • Avoid warning when including the systemfonts header (#77)
  • Fix size selection of non-scalable fonts when the requested size is bigger than the available
  • Fix compilation bug when systemfont is used in C packages (#76)

systemfonts 1.0.2

CRAN release: 2021-05-11

  • Ensure compitability with freetype <= 2.4.11 (#70, @jan-glx)
  • Prepare for UCRT compilation

systemfonts 1.0.1

CRAN release: 2021-02-09

  • Fix a bug in font matching on Windows when matching monospace fonts
  • Fix a bug in reset_font_cache() on mac that would cause a system crash if the cache was not filled in advance (#67)

systemfonts 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2021-02-01

  • Tweak size determination for non-scalable fonts
  • Fix bug when switching between scalable and non-scalable fonts in the cache
  • Add utility for querying font fallbacks at both the R and C level
  • Add C-level API for finding emoji embeddings in strings
  • Add utility for getting weight of font from C code
  • Add utility for getting family name of font from C code
  • Add font weight and width to the output of font_info()

systemfonts 0.3.2

CRAN release: 2020-09-29

  • Fix compiled code for old R versions
  • Changes to comply with next cpp11 version

systemfonts 0.3.1

CRAN release: 2020-09-08

  • Fixed warnings on CRAN LTO machine

systemfonts 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2020-09-01

  • Added get_cached_face() so that other packages might retrieve FT_Face objects from the cache.
  • Adapted cpp11
  • Add infrastructure for setting OpenType font features on a registered font with either register_font() or the new register_variant(), along with the font_feature() function.

systemfonts 0.2.3

CRAN release: 2020-06-09

  • Replace the buggy Freetype cache subsystem with own implementation
  • Fix indexing bug in glyph_metrics()

systemfonts 0.2.2

CRAN release: 2020-05-14

  • Fix remaining valgrind issues by fixing the included font-manager code
  • Rewrite the text shaping algorithm to make it more future proof
  • Work around a nasty freetype bug in their cache subsystem

systemfonts 0.2.1

CRAN release: 2020-04-29

  • Various fixes to the correctness of compiled code

systemfonts 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2020-04-16

  • Add string_widths_dev() and string_metrics_dev() to request the current graphic device for string widths and metrics.
  • Add system for registering non-system fonts for look-up.
  • systemfonts will now detect user-installed fonts on Windows (possible after the 1806 update)
  • Font lookup is now cached for faster performance. The caching will get flushed when new fonts are added to the registry, or manually with reset_font_cache()
  • Systemfonts now provide querying of font information with font_info() and glyph_info()
  • Basic string shaping is now provided with shape_string()
  • Line width calculation is now available with string_width() (ignores presence of newlines, use shape_string() for more complicated strings)
  • Added str_split_emoji() for splitting of strings into substrings of emoji and non-emoji glyphs
  • Provide a header file for easy use from within C in other packages
  • Fix memory management issues on Mac
  • Fix handling of erroneous font files on windows

systemfonts 0.1.1

CRAN release: 2019-07-01

  • Fix compilation on systems with a very old fontconfig version (Solaris)

systemfonts 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2019-06-28

  • First version with match_font() and system_fonts() capabilities. More to come.
  • Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.