Bug illustration

There is currently a mac-only bug where right-to-left languages (arabic, hebrew, …) are incorrectly displayed on mac.

In the following chart uploaded from RStudio on mac, the xlab text provided is incorrectly displayed (left to right instead of RTL). Also the linkage between two consecutive letters (i.e. س connected to ل would be سل) is broken.

plot(1:5,1:5,ylab="hello",xlab="سلام",cex.lab=3)

See also this Stack Overflow thread about this issue (incorrectly labelled as ggplot2 bug, it is actually a mac-only bug already present with base graphics): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22423760/right-to-left-languages-support-in-r-using-mac

This bug seems to have been around for a long time (since at least R 2.15.0) and is still present in R 3.2.2