[R] Importing vector graphics into R

[Paul Murrell]

Hi

Sorry to join this thread late.  As a couple of people have pointed out, 
no general solution exists currently.  It's an interesting problem 
though and something that I have experimented with in a couple of ways 
in the past.  I have written down some thoughts about the issues and 
described a couple of experiments;  it's all very rough at this stage 
and would need a lot of polishing and packaging to be widely useful, but 
you might want to take a look at 
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/R/Import/import.html
and particularly the further link
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/R/Import/importvector.html

Paul


Hinrich Göhlmann wrote:
> Thanks for your suggestions!
> 
> Even though they are less than encouraging, I quickly want to give you 
> the rational why I have asked this. Actually I was inspired by Paul 
> Murrell's useR presentation - have a look at the very last slide of his 
> presentation which you can find at
> http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/Talks/useR2004.pdf - If only this 
> kind of functionality could be generalized to any vector graphics... Oh, 
> well, still pixmap gives a solution for the moment and that's ok. Thanks 
> again!
> 
> Cheers,
> hinrich   d8-)
> 
> 
> Roger Bivand wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Hinrich Göhlmann wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Dear R users,
>>>
>>> I know of the possibility to import bitmaps via the nice pixmap 
>>> library.    But if you later on create a PDF it is somewhat 
>>> disappointing to have such graphics bitmapped. Is there a trick (via 
>>> maps?) to import a vector graphic and have them plotted onto a graph? 
>>> My searching attempts in the searchable r-help archive did not seem 
>>> to result in anything useful...
>>
>>
>>
>> No, nothing obvious. If you have an Xfig file - or convert to one from 
>> PS,
>> you may be able to extract the lines with their attributes by hand (the
>> file is just text, so you can "see" the vector graphics), and write an R
>> function to plot them (rescaled) onto the device if you need a single
>> graphical element many times. Otherwise, perhaps edit the graphics file
>> after R has completed its work. None of the vector map formats is easy to
>> use for this kind of trick, especially because you probably need
>> attributes on the lines (thickness, colour).
>>
>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> hinrich   d8-)
>>>
>>
>>
> 
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-- 
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/