R Observatory: Metrics for showtext version 0.9-8

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

showtext

0.9-8Package record

Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs

21packages dependsuggested by 24

929.9Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Yixuan QiuCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Issues ↗

Making it easy to use various types of fonts ('TrueType', 'OpenType', Type 1, web fonts, etc.) in R graphs, and supporting most output formats of R graphics including PNG, PDF and SVG. Text glyphs will be converted into polygons or raster images, hence after the plot has been created, it no longer relies on the font files. No external software such as 'Ghostscript' is needed to use this package.

Changes in 0.9-8

Fixed a segmentation fault in glyph bitmap rendering caused by a behavior change in FreeType 2.14.2.
Fixed the use of non-API function Rf_findVar() in R >= 4.5.0.

From inst/NEWS.Rd in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)

install.packages("showtext", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("yixuan/showtext")

Development version from yixuan/showtext. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-showtext

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-showtext

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 2.6 min · r-devel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-04
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-06-09
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-06-08
OK13 OK2026-05-02

Show 5 earlier changesHide 5 earlier changes

NOTE11 OK, 1 NOTE2026-04-25
OK14 OK2026-04-16
NOTE13 OK, 1 NOTE2026-03-29
ERROR12 OK, 1 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-03-17
NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.9-8

READMEYes · 1,037 wordsVignettesYes · 1 · dynamicNEWSYes · mentions 0.9-8Citation fileNoWebsitenot declared in DESCRIPTION

Help pages: 4
Examples that run: 0%3 never run
Exported functions with examples: 75%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 0%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (1)

showtext: Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs

How these are measured

Downloads

929.9K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #353 · ~2.5K/day · ~77.5K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

92.9K30 days

271.6K90 days

929.9K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on12K r2u37K conda_forge96 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

yixuan/showtext ↗Account: yixuan

502Stars

37Forks

19Open issues

0Open PRs

0Releases

292Commits

2Commit identities

fontgraphicsr-graphicsgraphics-device

292 commits · Last activity 2026-03-21 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 67%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 14
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 2

Stars over time

2025-10-08 · 4962026-08-21 · 502

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

1 development-tooling and community-health practice detected across 1 family in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/yixuan/showtext on 2026-10-11.

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

7 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing showtext adds 2 packages (1 with compiled code, 3.1 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: showtextdb 1.9 MB, sysfonts 1.2 MB.

Depends (2)

sysfonts showtextdb

Imports (1)

grDevices

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (5)

knitr rmarkdown prettydoc curl jsonlite

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

21direct

101indirect

Depends 1 · Imports 20

Suggested by 24

Show all 45 packagesHide all 45 packages

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

FactoMineR dlookr hexSticker emojifont meme huito hmsidwR ggChinaFlag memery insectecol kanjistat cartographr fonctionr agregR gghdx lapop mipplot MSUthemes plot4fun yaleBraille RSSthemes

Suggests, most downloaded first

knitr shiny ggdist ggtime treemapify thematic emayili OlinkAnalyze xaringanthemer cricketdata ggpedigree pcutils ggblend RGraphics cardargus pctax earthUI ggCheysson rtrek mapchina lcars polaroid statim rbranding

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (2)

Yixuan Qiu

Author, Maintainer since 0.2 (2014)

Dave Raggett

Contributor · added in 0.9-8

UTF-8 library. See the AUTHORS file for details

Listed in earlier versions (1)

authors/contributors of the included software. See file AUTHORS for details.

no longer listed · 0.2 to 0.9-7

Releases (24)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.9-8Latest
record
2026-03-21 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.9-7
record
2024-03-02 · diff ↗
0.9-6
record
2023-05-03 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.9-5
record
2022-02-09 · diff ↗
0.9-4
record
2021-08-14 · diff ↗
0.9-3
record
2021-07-26 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
0.9-2
record
2021-01-10 · diff ↗
0.9-1
record
2020-11-14 · diff ↗
0.9
record
2020-08-13 · diff ↗
0.8-1
record
2020-05-25 · diff ↗

Show 22 earlier eventsHide 22 earlier events

0.8
record
2020-05-09 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.7-1
record
2020-01-27 · diff ↗
0.7
record
2019-06-11 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.6
record
2019-01-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.5-1
record
2018-01-16 · diff ↗
0.5
record
2017-09-22 · diff ↗ ·
added 4 exports
showtext_opts, showtext_begin, showtext_end, showtext_auto
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.4-6
record
2017-01-05 · diff ↗
0.4-5
record
2016-10-14 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.4-4
record
2015-10-30 · diff ↗
0.4-3
record
2015-09-20 · diff ↗
0.4-2
record
2015-05-24 · diff ↗
0.4-1
record
2015-04-27 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
showtext.opts, showtext.auto
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16
0.3
record
2015-03-11 · diff ↗
R
R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10
0.2
record
2014-01-01
R
R 3.0.0 released · 2013-04-03

Package metadata

First published: 2014-01-01
Total releases: 24 / 12 yrs
License: Apache License (>= 2.0)
Copyright: see file COPYRIGHTS
Download size: 431 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("showtext")

Format

Qiu, Y., & Raggett, D. (2026). showtext: Using Fonts More Easily in R Graphs (Version 0.9-8) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.showtext

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for showtext version 0.9-8 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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