[Rd] postscript failure manifests in plot.TukeyHSD

Peter Ehlers ehlers at ucalgary.ca
Tue Dec 14 19:16:12 CET 2010


On 2010-12-14 09:27, Ben Bolker wrote:
> Jari Oksanen<jari.oksanen<at>  oulu.fi>  writes:
>
>>
>> Hello R Developers,
>>
>> Dear R-developers,
>>
>> I ran some standard tests with currently (today morning) compiled R release
>> candidate in Linux R 2.12.1 RC (2010-12-13 r53843). Some of these tests used
>> plot.TukeyHSD function. This worked OK on the screen (X11 device), but
>> PostScript file could not be rendered. The following example had the problem
>> with me:
>>
>> postscript(file="tukeyplot.ps")
>> example(plot.TukeyHSD)
>> dev.off()
>>
>> I couldn't view the resulting file with evince in Linux nor in the standard
>> Preview in MacOS. When I compared the generated "tukeyplot.ps" to the same
>> file generated with an older R in my Mac, I found one difference:
>>
>> $ diff -U2 oldtukeyplot.ps /Volumes/TIKKU/tukeyplot.ps
>> --- oldtukeyplot.ps    2010-12-14 12:06:07.000000000 +0200
>> +++ /Volumes/TIKKU/tukeyplot.ps    2010-12-14 12:13:32.000000000 +0200
>> @@ -172,5 +172,5 @@
>>   0 setgray
>>   0.00 setlinewidth
>> -[ 3.00 5.00] 0 setdash
>> +[ 0.00 0.00] 0 setdash
>>   np
>>   660.06 91.44 m
>>
>> Editing the changed line to its old value "[ 3.00 5.00] 0 setdash" also
>> fixed the problem both in Linux and in Mac. Evidently something has changed,
>> and probably somewhere else than in plot.TukeyHSD (which hasn't changed
>> since r51093 in trunk and never in R-2-12-branch). I know nothing about
>> PostScript so that I cannot say anything more (and I know viewers can fail
>> with standard conforming PostScript but it is a bit disconcerting that two
>> viewers fail when they worked earlier).
>
>    I must really be avoiding work today ...
>
>    I can diagnose this (I think) but don't know the best way to
> solve it.
>
>    At this point, line widths on PDF devices were allowed to be<1.
>
> ==========
> r52180 | murrell | 2010-06-02 23:20:33 -0400 (Wed, 02 Jun 2010) | 1 line
> Changed paths:
>     M /trunk/NEWS
>     M /trunk/src/library/grDevices/src/devPS.c
>
> allow lwd less than 1 on PDF device
> ==========
>
>    The behavior of PDF devices (by experiment) is to draw a 0-width
> line as 1 pixel wide, at whatever resolution is currently being
> rendered.  On the other hand, 0-width lines appear to break PostScript.
> (with the Linux viewer 'evince' I get warnings about "rangecheck -15"
> when trying to view such a file).
>
>    plot.TukeyHSD  contains the lines
>
> abline(h = yvals, lty = 1, lwd = 0, col = "lightgray")
> abline(v = 0, lty = 2, lwd = 0, ...)
>
>    which are presumably meant to render minimum-width lines.
>
>    I don't know whether it makes more sense to (1) change plot.TukeyHSD
> to use positive widths (although that may not help: I tried setting
> lwd=1e-5 and got the line widths rounded to 0 in the PostScript file);
> (2) change the postscript driver to *not* allow line widths<  1 (i.e.,
> distinguish between PS and PDF and revert to the pre-r52180 behaviour
> for PS only).
>
>    On reflection #2 seems to make more sense, but digging through devPS.c
> it's not immediately obvious to me where/how in SetLineStyle or
> PostScriptSetLineTexture one can tell whether the current driver
> is PS or PDF ...
>
That may not do it. I find the same problem (fixed by
Jari's replacement of [ 0.00 0.00] with [ 3.00 5.00];
haven't tried anything else yet) when I use pdf()
instead of postscript().
This is on Vista.

Peter Ehlers



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