request: tilde path expansion

[r2evans]

I haven't used sysfonts directly, but I'm playing around with showtext -- I think it's a very helpful tool, and I'll likely work it into some of my projects. Thanks!

This issue was "triggered" by showtext but traces down to this package. When I was testing showtext with a font I have in a project directory, I tried to load a font using a tilde-path, and it failed:

library(showtext)
font.add('xkcd', '~/Documents/Projects/GRUMPs/Logo/xkcd.ttf')
## Error in font.add("xkcd", "~/Documents/Projects/GRUMPs/Logo/xkcd.ttf") : 
##   freetype: cannot open resource, error code 1

It works fine if I use the full path myself or use normalizePath() (or even path.expand()) manually. (The problem appears to arise from sysfonts:::.check.font.dir() taking the path literally.)

Even though it's mostly cosmetic, any issues with including normalizePath() in .check.font.path()? Alternatively, would including it in showtext::font.add() be better?

sessionInfo()
## R version 3.2.0 (2015-04-16)
## Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
## Running under: Windows 8 x64 (build 9200)
##
## locale:
## [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 
## [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
## [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
## [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
## [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    
##
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
##
## other attached packages:
## [1] showtext_0.4-2 sysfonts_0.5   r2_0.4.15     
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] compiler_3.2.0  tools_3.2.0     htmltools_0.2.6 showtextdb_1.0 
## [5] rmarkdown_0.6.1 digest_0.6.8   

[yixuan]

Thank you for the report. This seems to be a real problem. I'll take a look and fix it in the next version.

[r2evans]

I wasn't certain if this fits better in .check.font.path or if that function should assume that all paths are already normalized. If that is the case, perhaps the change should go in showtext.

[yixuan]

Actually font.add() is also a function contained in sysfonts, not showtext.
I would prefer adding normalizePath() inside .check.font.path, since it provides more convenience to the user.
Thanks for the catch!