Issue with some unicode not rendering

[ghost]

Hi,

I'm trying to create a PDF file in which I am using some wingding font within my chart, and it's not rendering properly when I'm knitting it. This wasn't an issue until switching from MikTex to tinytex.

---
title: "Untitled"
output: pdf_document
---

```{r}
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = mpg, y = hp)) + geom_point(shape = sprintf("\u2714"), size = 3)
```

The plot with the code above looks fine when I run the plot in R, but I get the following warning message when I knit it:

Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_points, x$x, x$y, x$pch, x$size):
conversion failure on '✔' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for < e2>
Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_points, x$x, x$y, x$pch, x$size):
conversion failure on '✔' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <9c>
Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_points, x$x, x$y, x$pch, x$size):
conversion failure on '✔' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <94>
Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_points, x$x, x$y, x$pch, x$size): font
metrics unknown for Unicode character U+2714

The plot gets rendered, but instead of checkmarks, I get "...".

I assume the issue is just a missing latex package, but I'm not sure which one I need to download to fix it.

EDIT: Please note that I added a space between "<" and "e2>" in the warning message above. Oddly the text disappears without that space.

[yihui]

I'm pretty sure this issue has nothing to do with tinytex or MiKTeX. The problem is from R, not LaTeX.

Please see the section "Encoding of multibyte characters" at https://yihui.name/knitr/demo/graphics/

[ghost]

Hi Yihui,

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction - Unfortunately, the various solutions proposed there did not work. Should I open an issue in the knitr repo?

[yihui]

The default LaTeX engine pdflatex is not good at dealing with Unicode characters. You may try xelatex instead:

---
title: "Untitled"
output:
  pdf_document:
    latex_engine: xelatex
---

```{r dev='cairo_pdf'}
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = mpg, y = hp)) + geom_point(shape = sprintf("\u2714"), size = 3)
```

[ghost]

Thank you very much for your help, Yihui. xelatex did the trick.