r-markdownflextablefarsiofficedown

Farsi/persian/arabic text not showing in Rmarkdown officedown/flextable when knitting to MS word

I'm using rmarkdown and also two useful packages (officedown and flextable) to produce an MS word document. However, when I write in other languages or change the header label of tables (using set_header_labels) to farsi (using font(cs.family = "Arial Unicode MS", part = "header")), it does not transform the text to the correct form in MS word (see the picture) although it is correctly shown in the rmarkdown viewer pane. I tested different fonts but the problem persists! I'm wondering if anyone has any solutions to this? Thanks.

Here is a reproducible example:

---
output: officedown::rdocx_document
---
```{r message=F, warning=F, echo=F}
library(sysfonts)
library(flextable)
library(officedown)
library(dplyr)
library(extrafont)
iris %>% head() %>% flextable() %>% set_header_labels(Sepal.Length="طول کاسبرگ") %>% 
  font(j = 1, part = "header", fontname = "B Nazanin") 
#you can choose other fonts like Arial Unicode MS too but it doesn't make any difference.
```

rmarkdown::render(input = paste0(getwd(),"/","ex.Rmd"), encoding="UTF-8")

enter image description here

Solution

  • The new version of R is more compatible with UTF-8.

    https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/NEWS.R-4.2.1.html

    Please update your R, OS, and packages then try again.

    It worked for me.

    enter image description here

    > sessionInfo()
R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8  LC_CTYPE=C                            
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

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

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.9        digest_0.6.29     R6_2.5.1          officedown_0.2.4 
 [5] evaluate_0.15     zip_2.2.0         gdtools_0.2.4     cachem_1.0.6     
 [9] rlang_1.0.3       cli_3.3.0         uuid_1.1-0        xml2_1.3.3       
[13] rmarkdown_2.14    tools_4.2.1       officer_0.4.3     xfun_0.31        
[17] yaml_2.3.5        fastmap_1.1.0     compiler_4.2.1    systemfonts_1.0.4
[21] rvg_0.2.5         memoise_2.0.1     htmltools_0.5.2   knitr_1.39       
>