Plots in Positron look markedly worse than in RStudio. Am I doing something wrong?

[tomshafer]

I'm trying out Positron and noticed that fonts especially look pretty "off" compared to what I'm seeing in RStudio. I'm not sure whether it's an antialiasing problem or if I don't have the right options set up.

Demo plotting code:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(penguins, aes(flipper_len, bill_len, color = species)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  facet_wrap(~ island) + 
  theme_minimal(base_size = 14)

Copied fron Positron:

Copied from RStudio:

[juliasilge]

Can you say more about the operating system that you are using with Positron/RStudio? Does this happen to be Linux?

One thing to be aware of is that Positron by default uses ragg for plotting. It might be good to check what happens when you are sure ragg is installed correctly (in case you were trying to install from source, maybe?) and you use ragg both in RStudio and Positron. You might see what happens when you turn ragg off in Positron, via putting options(ark.ragg = FALSE) in your .Rprofile.

[tomshafer]

Setting options(ark.ragg = FALSE) fixes things in Positron in the same way that not choosing the 'Agg' backend in RStudio seems OK. Odd, because {ragg} seems to generate figures just fine; there's some kind of interaction between the IDE and ragg.

[juliasilge]

Let us know if you end up finding something that is specific to Positron! I feel like something must be going wrong with your installation maybe, because ragg is supposed to make higher quality images, not lower quality ones. 😅

[tomshafer]

I did flip RStudio over to use Agg as the backend and I'm seeing similar font issues. So I'll track this down -- doesn't seem like a Positron issue at all. As mentioned in the reply, disabling {ragg} in RStudio and Positron seem to give quick antialiasing.

Thanks for the quick response!