[R] postscript: can't center plot

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

You can't centre with paper = "special". You seemto be trying to set a
special *paper* size, and there is no way to do that: paper="special" says
make the paper size the same as the device region so there will never be a
margin.

This is really an issue for the PS device manager, which should be able to 
decide how to print a document of size A on paper of size B: yours seems 
to print at one corner of the page.  Normally with paper="special"
the R output contains no paper information at all.

If I understand you aright, you do want to reduce width and height but do
want a paper size (I nearly wrote `standard' there, but I presume it is a
non-Standard one like `letter').  Using width=6, height=8, paper="a4" will
centre on A4 with large margins.

Brian

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Deborah Swayne wrote:

> One of our color postscript printers needs a slightly larger margin
> than the default, so I'm trying to send slightly smaller graphics to
> it, but all the extra margin I provide ends up at the right and
> bottom of the page.
> 
> These are the relevant (I imagine) ps.options:
> 
> $paper      [1] "special"
> $width      [1] 10
> $height     [1] 8
> $pagecentre [1] TRUE
> 
> I tried this on two systems, in two versions of R, and the output
> is identical.
>   linux: R 1.6.1 (2002-11-01)
>   mips-sgi-irix6.5: R 1.6.1 Beta (2002-10-28)
> 
> I'll attach a postscript file, which is very simple but I think
> shows the asymmetry I'm talking about.
> 
> I'll file a bug report if I should, but I thought I'd give y'all a
> chance to confirm the behavior or tell me I'm going about this all
> wrong.
> 
> Debby
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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