Download and Register Fonts from GDPR-Compliant Providers For Use In R graphics • AddFonts

Download and register fonts from GDPR-compliant providers for use in R graphics. Currently supports Bunny Fonts, a privacy-first alternative to Google Fonts.

Features

🔒 GDPR-compliant: Uses Bunny Fonts (no tracking, no data collection)
📦 Simple API: One function to download and register fonts
💾 Smart caching: Downloads once, reuses forever
🎨 Full variants: Regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic support

Installation

# From r-universe
install.packages("AddFonts", repos = "https://gnoblet.r-universe.dev")

System Requirements

Requires woff2 command-line tool to convert fonts:

Click to see installation instructions

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install woff2

# Fedora/RHEL
sudo dnf install woff2-tools

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S woff2

# macOS
brew install woff2

# Windows or else
# Compile from: https://github.com/google/woff2

Quick Start

Add Fonts With One Core Function

To add a font to R, simply call add_font() with the font family name retrieved from the Bunny Fonts website. For example, to add the “Oswald” font:

library(AddFonts)
# Download and register Oswald font
add_font("oswald")
#> ✔ Downloaded variant: 'bunny-oswald-latin-400-normal.ttf'
#> ✔ Downloaded variant: 'bunny-oswald-latin-700-normal.ttf'
#> ✔ Font "oswald" registered and added to cache.

Preview Fonts

The preview_font() function plots all downloaded and registered variants of a font family in one go. Once you have picked a font, for instance “Merriweather”, calling the preview_font() function will show you all its variants, and “Merriweather” has 4: regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic.

library(AddFonts)
preview_font("merriweather", regular.wt = 400, bold.wt = 700)

Add Fonts And Use With ggplot2

Let’s imagine we want to use several fonts in a simple plot. First, we loop over a vector of font family names and call add_font() for each one to download and register them with R.

library(AddFonts)
library(showtext)
library(ggplot2)

fonts <- c(
  "oswald",
  "blaka-ink",
  "barrio",
  "major-mono-display",
  "merriweather",
  "montserrat",
  "sixtyfour",
  "playfair-display",
  "inter",
  "aboreto",
  "aclonica",
  "akronim",
  "babylonica"
)

for (font in fonts) {
  add_font(font)
}

Now that fonts have been registered, we can use them in a ggplot for instance.

showtext_auto()

font_data <- data.frame(
  x = 0.5,
  y = seq(0.95, 0.1, length.out = length(fonts)),
  label = paste(tools::toTitleCase(gsub("-", " ", fonts)), "Font"),
  family = fonts,
  size = c(9, 8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9)
)

ggplot(
  font_data,
  aes(x = x, y = y, label = label, family = family, size = size)
) +
  geom_text(hjust = 0.5) +
  scale_size_identity() +
  xlim(0, 1) +
  ylim(0, 1) +
  theme_void()

Cache Management

# Get cache location
get_cache_dir()

# Clear specific fonts
cache_clean(families = c("roboto", "open-sans"))

# Clear all fonts
cache_clean(reset = TRUE)

Why Bunny Fonts?

Bunny Fonts is a privacy-focused, GDPR-compliant alternative to Google Fonts:

🔒 No tracking or data collection
🚀 Fast global CDN
🆓 Free and open-source
🎨 Includes most popular Google Fonts

Perfect for EU users or anyone prioritizing privacy.

After a period of testing on real world projects using Bunny Fonts as the only-and-default font provider, AddFonts is meant to integrate other providers.

How AddFont Works

Downloads WOFF2 files from Bunny Fonts CDN
Converts to TTF format using woff2_decompress
Caches locally for reuse
Registers with R via sysfonts package

Why convert? Bunny Fonts serves WOFF2 (web-optimized), but R’s sysfonts needs TTF format. Conversion happens once; subsequent uses load instantly from cache.

In the background, S7 classes manage font metadata and caching logic, while sysfonts handles registration with R’s graphics system.

showtext - Using fonts in R graphics
sysfonts - Loading fonts into R
S7 - a new OO system for R
see also pyfonts for registering fonts in Python (made by Joseph Barbier).

License

GPL (>= 3)

Note: AddFonts is experimental. API may change. Feedback welcome!

AddFonts