Crash on macOS Sonoma 14.5 when saving PNG/TIFF with ggsave (ragg/systemfonts/textshaping) #203
Description
Summary
On macOS Sonoma 14.5 (ARM64, R 4.5.1), ggsave() with PNG or TIFF devices crashes the R session when {ragg, textshaping, systemfonts} are involved. This occurs even for trivial ggplot2 plots. pdf output works fine.
The crash trace shows a segfault in FreeType’s COLRv1 handling (tt_face_get_paint_layers), called from systemfonts → harfbuzz → textshaping → ragg during string width measurement. After reinstalling {ragg, textshaping, systemfonts} from CRAN binaries and explicitly using ragg::agg_png or ragg::agg_tiff, the problem was resolved.
Minimal reprex
library(ggplot2)
# Crashes
ggsave("test.png", ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) + geom_point())
# Works after reinstall + explicit ragg device
ggsave("test.png",
ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) + geom_point(),
device = ragg::agg_png, width = 6, height = 4, units = "in", res = 300)
ggsave("test.tiff",
ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) + geom_point(),
device = ragg::agg_tiff, width = 6, height = 4, units = "in", res = 300,
compression = "lzw")
Crash log (truncated)
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x000000000000004a
Thread 0 Crashed:
0 systemfonts.so tt_face_get_paint_layers (ttcolr.c:1529)
1 libharfbuzz.0.dylib hb_ft_get_glyph_extents
2 textshaping.so HarfBuzzShaper::fill_shape_info
3 ragg.so textshaping::string_width
4 libR.dylib GEStrWidth
5 grid.so L_stringMetric
...
Environment
R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
Running under: macOS Sonoma 14.5
Packages:
- ragg 1.4.0
- systemfonts 1.2.3
- textshaping 1.0.1
- ggplot2 3.5.2
systemfonts::font_info("Helvetica") runs without issue.
ggsave(..., device = "pdf") always works.
Workarounds
Forcing Quartz device works:
ggsave("test.png", plot, device = function(...) grDevices::png(type = "quartz", ...))
Full fix: clean reinstall of {ragg, textshaping, systemfonts} from CRAN arm64 binaries. After that, ragg::agg_png and ragg::agg_tiff worked reliably.