Ensure font availability in a script — require

When running a script on a different machine you are not always in control of which fonts are installed on the system and thus how graphics created by the script ends up looking. require_font() is a way to specify your font requirements for a script. It will look at the available fonts and if the required font family is not present it will attempt to fetch it from one of the given repositories (in the order given). If that fails, it will either throw an error or, if fallback is given, provide an alias for the fallback so it maps to the required font.

Usage

require_font(
  family,
  fallback = NULL,
  dir = tempdir(),
  repositories = c("Google Fonts", "Font Squirrel"),
  error = TRUE
)

Arguments

family: The font family to require
fallback: An available font to fall back to if family cannot be found or downloaded
dir: The location to put the font file downloaded from repositories
repositories: The repositories to search for the font in case it is not available on the system. They will be tried in the order given. Currently only "Google Fonts" and "Font Squirrel" is available.
error: Should the function throw an error if unsuccessful?

Value

Invisibly TRUE if the font is available or FALSE if not (this can only be returned if error = FALSE)

Examples

# Should always work
require_font("sans")