[Rd] More plotting comments

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 20:23:23 +1100
> From: Telford Tendys <telford@progsoc.uts.edu.au>
> To: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Rd] More plotting comments

[...]

> Finally, when I do a plot like this:
> 
> 	curve( sin, lty="12345678" )
> 
> I get a reasonable looking curved line on my X11 window but then I
> do the same thing in postscript I get the interesting result that the
> dashes are very tiny when viewed in ghostscript (5.10) but sensible
> length on paper from the printer. Is this a ghostscript bug or is there
> something non-portable about R output files?

It looks fine here with ghostscript 6.0.  5.10 is rather old (yes,
I know it is the current GPL version).

> An simple example of setting up an eps output for a report might be
> helpful because a lot of people will be doing it. Just a suggestion:
> 
> ps.options( horizontal=FALSE, onefile=FALSE, paper="special" )
> postscript( "/tmp/test.eps", width=4, height=3 )
> par( mar=c( 3.5, 3.5, 0, 0 ), ps=10, mgp=c( 2.5, 1, 0 ))
> curve( sin, 0, 2 * pi, lty="1494" )
> dev.off()

I think it is better to set pointsize on the call to postscript().

> I know it isn't as flashy as some of the existing examples but it does
> demonstrate the typical things that you are going to need such as
> point sizes, paper sizes, margins, etc. It is also something that can
> quickly be grabbed and used by most people.

And possibly confuse them. Not everyone wants to move the labels
around, and in general I think zeroing the margins is a bad idea.
In the technical sense of S graphics you want to include figure regions
not plot regions in other publications.  (In years of doing this
and scores of publications I have only once moved the axis labels.)


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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