Plotmath greek characters render differently depending on plot device

[dkStevensNZed]

A quirky little issue this. Using quarto/pdf, I created a plot with plotmath greek character mu $\mu$ in the y label. In rendering to pdf, if the chunk's dev is not selected {r}, the greek mu is rendered as a proportional symbol ($\propto$). If I use {r,dev='cairo_pdf'} , mu renders correctly. The same code in pure R (executed from the console) shows properly. Here's a MWE in quarto. I hope this is a known issue. Any help is welcome.

`---
format: pdf

{r}
#| echo: false
#| message: false
#| fig-cap: myCap
#| fig-height: 3.5
#| fig-width: 5.
#| out-width: 5.in
x <- rnorm(20,0,1)
plot(x,
xlab='x var',
ylab=expression(paste('The Greek Letter mu (', mu, ')')))

{r,dev='cairo_pdf'}
#| echo: false
#| message: false
#| fig-cap: myCap2
#| fig-height: 3.5
#| fig-width: 5.
#| out-width: 5.in
plot(x,
xlab='x var',
ylab=expression(paste('The Greek Letter mu (', mu, ')')))
`

[benj919]

Hi @dkStevensNZed

Thanks for this issue.

Unicode plotting in R is a sad mess -.- There was an issue where Cran did a crack down recently: #66

I'm pretty sure the default printing also depends on your locale and language settings.

Iirc we tried using cairo_pdf, but it did not play well with other parts of the plotting code... or I didn't have the time to fully convert all plotting 🤷‍♂️ we may revisit this topic at some point

Are you asking for help, or was this just a comment on how you solved the issue?

cheers

[dkStevensNZed]

Thanks for the update. Kinda both - asking for help and the comment on the approach to use if ever one needs to avoids these circumstances. I haven't tried all possibilities, only noticed that 'mu' becomes 'proportion' but beta renders correctly. I haven't noticed other issues with cairo_pdf. What should I be looking out for?