Execute R Script - characters not displaying on saved image

Question

Execute R Script - characters not displaying on saved image

David Alexander 1

Updated this question with new information:

Using Azure ML Studio & Execute R Script to run some existing models. I need to generate outputs with saved plots which I am doing with the openxlsx package and saving the outputs to some azure cloud storage. This part all works well. The problem is that the plots do not have characters displayed correctly, instead they are "squares"

I have recreated the problem with some repeatable code using the data in ggplot2. This is the relevant code snippet that I am running in an "azureml_main" function. This example I actually copied from another azure help page to keep things simple and compatible as possible : https://gallery.azure.ai/Experiment/Tutorial-Base-R-Graphics-in-AzureML-2

  imageName <- "testplot.png"  
  png(imageName)  
  plot(price ~ carat, data = diamonds, main = "Price vs Carat")  
  dev.off()  
  wb <- createWorkbook()  
  addWorksheet(wb, "testplotsheet", gridLines = TRUE)  
  insertImage(wb, "testplotsheet", imageName)  
  saveWorkbook(wb, file = xlName, overwrite = TRUE)

On retrieving the saved excel workbook, this is what the image looks like

The problem is to get characters to display correctly. The same problem occurs in tiff, jpg svg formats. But pdf displays fonts! On further investigation I am wondering if there are actually any system fonts installed on this compute cluster machine because the folders /usr/lib/share/fonts & /usr/share/fonts do not exist

Can anyone at microsoft check & confirm this (seems a bit of an oversight?) or advise where the fonts are installed for this "Execute R script" machine

Here are some data from the azureml instance sessionInfo

R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
Platform: x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /azureml-envs/azureml_6ff64eff0a652bbe0bb1d84fc0884554/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: /azureml-envs/azureml_6ff64eff0a652bbe0bb1d84fc0884554/lib/R/lib/libRlapack.so

locale:
1 LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=C.UTF-8
[4] LC_COLLATE=C.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=C.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=C.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=C.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C LC_ADDRESS=C
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C LC_MEASUREMENT=C.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
1 stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages:
1 httr_1.4.1 RODBC_1.3-16 tibble_3.0.1 tidyr_1.0.2
[5] stringr_1.4.0 data.table_1.12.8 azuremlsdk_1.10.0 openxlsx_4.2.5
[9] dplyr_0.8.5 jsonlite_1.6.1 reticulate_1.12

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
1 Rcpp_1.0.8 magrittr_1.5 tidyselect_1.0.0 lattice_0.20-41
[5] R6_2.4.1 rlang_1.0.1 tools_3.5.1 grid_3.5.1
[9] ellipsis_0.3.0 assertthat_0.2.1 lifecycle_0.2.0 crayon_1.3.4
[13] Matrix_1.2-18 zip_2.2.0 purrr_0.3.4 vctrs_0.2.4
[17] glue_1.4.0 stringi_1.4.3 compiler_3.5.1 pillar_1.4.3
[21] pkgconfig_2.0.3

YutongTie-MSFT 53,966 Reputation points Moderator

2022-02-04T01:35:07.28+00:00
Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us, could you please try below to see if that works? In AML studio, UTF-8 is by default.

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 'en_US.UTF-8')

Regards,
Yutong
David Alexander 1 Reputation point

2022-02-04T09:51:33.62+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to read and give some feedback. This has not made any difference. Also, I ran the session.info command right after that line and the output was exactly the same as in the original post

For a bit more information, this is being run in a compute cluster, machine "STANDARD_D2_V3"

Here's the output from running "capabilities"

name value

1 jpeg TRUE
2 png TRUE
3 tiff TRUE
4 tcltk TRUE
5 X11 FALSE
6 aqua FALSE
7 http/ftp TRUE
8 sockets TRUE
9 libxml TRUE
10 fifo TRUE
11 cledit FALSE
12 iconv TRUE
13 NLS TRUE
14 profmem TRUE
15 cairo TRUE
16 ICU TRUE
17 long.double TRUE
18 libcurl TRUE

2 answers

Your answer

YutongTie-MSFT 53,966 Reputation points Moderator

2022-02-04T01:35:07.28+00:00

Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us, could you please try below to see if that works? In AML studio, UTF-8 is by default.

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 'en_US.UTF-8')

Regards,
Yutong
David Alexander 1 Reputation point

2022-02-04T09:51:33.62+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to read and give some feedback. This has not made any difference. Also, I ran the session.info command right after that line and the output was exactly the same as in the original post

For a bit more information, this is being run in a compute cluster, machine "STANDARD_D2_V3"

Here's the output from running "capabilities"

name value

1 jpeg TRUE
2 png TRUE
3 tiff TRUE
4 tcltk TRUE
5 X11 FALSE
6 aqua FALSE
7 http/ftp TRUE
8 sockets TRUE
9 libxml TRUE
10 fifo TRUE
11 cledit FALSE
12 iconv TRUE
13 NLS TRUE
14 profmem TRUE
15 cairo TRUE
16 ICU TRUE
17 long.double TRUE
18 libcurl TRUE

Answer 1

David Alexander 1

@YutongTie-MSFT apologies for the tag, but no other responders yet. Any further suggestions or insight into why this problem is occurring? I have done extensive research into this and it must be something to do with the available encoding/fonts on the Ubuntu setup on ML Studio & what the code is attempting to use in the png encoding. Your suggestion made a lot of sense, but didn't seem to change the environment at all? Any idea why? It's also incredibly difficult to troubleshoot because in this black-box Azure ML studio I do not have access to a console to run code segments

David Alexander 1 Reputation point

2022-02-07T12:12:45.03+00:00
This is the output of checking available locales on the system

system("locale -a", intern = TRUE)

[1] "C" "C.UTF-8" "POSIX"

How do I ensure that the png device (or jpg or pdf) is attempting to write characters which are compatible?

Answer 2

update : there are no fonts installed in R or seemingly on the container/image which is launched by "Execute R script". The system contains no fonts folder or /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file, which is what it should be for ubuntu. R installation does not have "sysfonts" library and it can't be installed due to a missing file "zlib". if sysfonts could be installed I could use showtext, or possibly resolve the issue

I've spent a week on this trying to get execute r task to save an image with characters, but it doesn't seem possible

Update : this image/compile needs to be updated, the R version is from 2018, and missing fonts. FYI, this refers to the "cluster" version"

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Execute R Script - characters not displaying on saved image

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