font issue in typst tables with gt with strings containing numbers and letters

[schochastics]

Bug description

When I render a gt table in typst that contains strings that mix letters and digits (e.g. "aaa111aaa") the font switches and the string renders weirdly.

Steps to reproduce

---
title: "Untitled"
format: typst
keep-typ: true
---

```{r}
df <- data.frame(a = c("aa111bbb", "abcdef"), b = c(1, 2))
gt::gt(df)
knitr::kable(df)
```

I get the following result:

The produced typst code for the gt table looks like this:

#[
#set text(font: ("system-ui", "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Helvetica", "Arial", "sans-serif", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji") , size: 12pt); #table(
  columns: 2,
  align: (left,right,),
  table.header(table.cell(align: bottom + left, fill: rgb("#ffffff"))[#set text(size: 1.0em , fill: rgb("#333333")); a], table.cell(align: bottom + right, fill: rgb("#ffffff"))[#set text(size: 1.0em , fill: rgb("#333333")); b],),
  table.hline(),
  table.cell(align: horizon + left, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[aa111bbb], table.cell(align: horizon + right, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[1],
  table.cell(align: horizon + left, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[abcdef], table.cell(align: horizon + right, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[2],
)
]

Expected behavior

When I remove

#set text(font: ("system-ui", "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Helvetica", "Arial", "sans-serif", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji") , size: 12pt);

from the intermediate typ file, I get the correct table when I compile that file

after playing around a bit, setting the font explicitly via gt::opt_table_font() also removes the weird behavio.

Actual behavior

No response

Your environment

Positron Version 2024.12.0 build 80

sessionInfo()

R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Running under: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.20.so;  LAPACK version 3.10.0

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

time zone: Europe/Berlin
tzcode source: system (glibc)

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

other attached packages:
 [1] gt_0.11.1       readxl_1.4.3    lubridate_1.9.3 forcats_1.0.0   stringr_1.5.1   dplyr_1.1.4    
 [7] purrr_1.0.2     readr_2.1.5     tidyr_1.3.1     tibble_3.2.1    ggplot2_3.5.1   tidyverse_2.0.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] styler_1.10.3     sass_0.4.9        utf8_1.2.4        generics_0.1.3    xml2_1.3.6       
 [6] stringi_1.8.4     hms_1.1.3         digest_0.6.37     magrittr_2.0.3    evaluate_1.0.1   
[11] grid_4.4.2        timechange_0.3.0  fastmap_1.2.0     R.oo_1.27.0       cellranger_1.1.0 
[16] R.cache_0.16.0    R.utils_2.12.3    fansi_1.0.6       scales_1.3.0      cli_3.6.3        
[21] rlang_1.1.4       R.methodsS3_1.8.2 munsell_0.5.1     commonmark_1.9.2  withr_3.0.2      
[26] tools_4.4.2       tzdb_0.4.0        colorspace_2.1-1  vctrs_0.6.5       R6_2.5.1         
[31] lifecycle_1.0.4   snakecase_0.11.1  janitor_2.2.0     pkgconfig_2.0.3   pillar_1.9.0     
[36] gtable_0.3.6      data.table_1.16.2 glue_1.8.0        xfun_0.49         tidyselect_1.2.1 
[41] knitr_1.49        htmltools_0.5.8.1 compiler_4.4.2    markdown_1.13

Quarto check output

Quarto 1.6.37
[✓] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: /home/david/.cache/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.4.0: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.70.0: OK
      Deno version 1.46.3: OK
      Typst version 0.11.0: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.6.37
      Path: /opt/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: v2023.10
      Chromium: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: TinyTex
      Path: /home/david/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux
      Version: 2023

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.10.12
      Path: /bin/python3
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with python3 -m pip install jupyter

[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.4.2
      Path: /usr/lib/R
      LibPaths:
        - /home/david/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.4
        - /usr/local/lib/R/site-library
        - /usr/lib/R/site-library
        - /usr/lib/R/library
      knitr: 1.49
      rmarkdown: 2.29

[✓] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

[mcanouil]

I can't reproduce the issue on macOS at least.

Note that since gt cannot emit Typst code, here it emits HTML table which is parsed by Quarto into AST which is then converted to the proper format, in this case Typst.
gt is the one setting the fonts you see in the Typst output, you can see this with gt::as_raw_html(gt::gt(df))) in R. (also why when you used gt::opt_table_font(), the behaviour changed)

I believe the font issue is more on your system which don't have the font.
I don't know if "system-ui" is recognised everywhere.

Anyhow, I don't see any Quarto issue here.

[schochastics]

Thanks. I was also not sure where to post this issue but just wanted to be sure that this is not on the quarto side. I will check what my system is doing.

[cscheid]

Let's keep this open at least for now - the behavior does feel unintuitive to me, so I'd like to understand it better.

[gordonwoodhull]

FWIW I’ve seen this too, but I wasn’t able to identify the root problem.

I’ll see if I can repro and then document how to troubleshoot this. I agree it’s not really a Quarto bug, but it’s something to be aware of.

[gordonwoodhull]

Repro

Okay, I have a simple repro in Typst on macOS.

#[
#set text(font: ("Apple Color Emoji") , size: 12pt); #table(
  columns: 2,
  align: (left,right,),
  table.header(table.cell(align: bottom + left, fill: rgb("#ffffff"))[#set text(size: 1.0em , fill: rgb("#333333")); a], table.cell(align: bottom + right, fill: rgb("#ffffff"))[#set text(size: 1.0em , fill: rgb("#333333")); b],),
  table.hline(),
  table.cell(align: horizon + left, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[aa111bbb], table.cell(align: horizon + right, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[1],
  table.cell(align: horizon + left, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[abcdef], table.cell(align: horizon + right, stroke: (top: (paint: rgb("#d3d3d3"), thickness: 0.75pt)))[2],
)
]

Root cause

The Apple Color Emoji font, installed on Macs, supports numbers but not letters. This is probably true of other emoji fonts.

If the first available font in the list is an emoji font, then the numbers will be bigger than the rest of the text. because emoji fonts have large glyph sizes.

The rest of the text will have a fallback font provided by Typst, unless disabled with

#set text(fallback: false)

If my theory is correct, then none of the fonts

"Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Helvetica", "Arial"

are installed on @schochastics's machine, or they are not available to Typst. But at least one of the emoji fonts

"Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"

is installed and available.

(quarto typst fonts will list fonts available to Typst.)

Font stacks

If there is a Quarto issue here, it is we translate CSS font lists into Typst font lists verbatim.

But "font stacks" like system-ui and sans-serif will not be recognized by Typst and may give a false sense of security.

Conceivably, we could substitute lists of appropriate fonts for "font stacks", at the mild maintenance burden of having to maintain such lists.

Our current behavior is surprising because the intent of the font list

"system-ui", "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Helvetica", "Arial", "sans-serif", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"

is clearly "choose a nice looking or at least sans serif font for text, and one of these emoji fonts for emoji". Not "use an emoji font for the numbers and a fallback font for the text".

For now I can add a note about this to the advanced docs on troubleshooting Typst fonts tracked in #11278. Similar to that issue, we again see that the letters have an unexpected serif font (the Typst default font).