[R] saving plots as objects?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:

> On Thursday 26 February 2004 14:47, Rajarshi Guha wrote:
> > Hi I had two questions regarding plots:
> >
> > * Is there are way to save a plot in the form of an object such that it
> > could be displayed/modified later?
> 
> Depends on what you want to do. Probably not for regular (base) plots. 

I think ?recordPlot does this, at least to allow plots to be saved, 
displayed again and added to.

> The 
> grid package has a concept of objects that can be edited (before and/or 
> after plotting them). Functions in the lattice package produce objects 
> that may be close to what you want. They are not plots themselves, but 
> rather a self-contained description of a plot (in the sense that they 
> contain the data as well as instructions on how to plot it). The data part 
> cannot be easily changed, but almost everything else can be manipulated 
> before plotting.

AFAIK that internal description is not documented and there are no
end-user tools for doing the manipulation.  Can you please point us to
details?   I suspect nothing can _easily_ be changed by end-users at 
present.

-- 
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)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595