Saving a plot using Hebrew (or UTF-8) encoding for text in pdf/svg devices in R?

Question

I would like to save a plot where the text (for example, in the title) is using Hebrew. Trying the following won't work:

pdf("temp.pdf")
plot(1, main = "שלום")
dev.off()

svg("temp.svg")
plot(1, main = "שלום")
dev.off()

Although using:

png("temp.png")
plot(1, main = "שלום")
dev.off()

Will give the correct output.

Is there a way to fix it for pdf and svg as well?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try using Cairo :

library(Cairo)
CairoPDF("temp.pdf")
plot(1, main = "שלום")
dev.off()

CairoSVG("temp.svg")
plot(1, main = "שלום")
dev.off()

Answer 2

You need to use pdfFonts to assign a font that has the proper glyphs. At the moment you screen device appears to be using such a font but your pdfFonts are deficinet when it comes to Hebrew.

?pdfFonts
names(pdfFonts()