graphics issues with r-cairo > 1.5

[durr1602]

Hi,
Just wanted to let you know that my colleague and I both had trouble with the PNG export of r-cairo (PDF are fine). For me, it meant that every graph (PNG files or the graphs displayed in the html report) had issues with text labels. Specifically, it felt like only a single character could be printed so all characters of the label would overlay on top of one another. I did not have that problem when I was using a past version of dimsum, but lately I've updated to 1.3 and the issue arose.

I tried using this command: conda install -c conda-forge r-cairo>1.5, but it did not solve the problem. I ended up comparing the yml files of both my envs and it turns out the version of r-cairo was 1.15.14 when it worked, 1.16 when it did not work.

Ultimately, using this command: conda install -c conda-forge r-cairo=1.5 (which installed r-cairo 1.15.15) did solve the problem.
It'd be good to change the requirements for any new install (if that doesn't cause any other issue, which it doesn't seem to).

Cheers!

[andrefaure]

Thanks for pointing this out @durr1602 ! This is a recurring issue with PNG export in R. Could you clarify the r-cairo version? Was it r-cairo 1.5 or 1.15 that worked? You said the command you used was conda install -c conda-forge r-cairo=1.5 which installed 1.15.15?

[durr1602]

Woops, that's a typo, sorry. The working version in my env is 1.5.15 (written as 1.5_15 if I run conda list).

[durr1602]

quick note, the issue is still present in the latest version of dimsum (1.3.1) and was again corrected by switching to r-cairo 1.5.15

[andrefaure]

Thanks @durr1602 , this seems to be due to specific incompatibilities of r-cairo with other graphics rendering packages (e.g. cairo). I have tested DiMSum with r-cairo 1.6 and cairo 1.16.0 on both linux and mac without encountering this issue. Could you please clarify which cairo version you are using?

I don't think it's sensible to change the requirements until the incompatibility has been identified.

[durr1602]

Hi Andre, same here, r-cairo 1.6_0 and cairo 1.16.0, still mumbles up the plot labels, that's very weird... The server runs on openSUSE Leap 15.5. At least we have a quick fix if people encounter this issue, even without changing the requirements.