[R] .ps and .pdf page size differences in FC vs. Debian

[Prof Brian Ripley]

This *is* in the R-admin manual that the INSTALL file asks you to read, 
and also in configure --help.  There is even an loud hint for `North 
American readers'.  If you have not read that, you need to.

At this stage, go to R_HOME/etc/Renviron and change the default for
R_PAPERSIZE to one of the values stated in the manual.

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Clint Harshaw wrote:

> R version: 2.0.0
> OS: Fedora Core 1
>
> When I'm using Fedora Core 1, Rplots.ps (and subsequent Rplots.pdf created 
> after using ps2pdf Rplots.ps) which are created from the command line 
> execution of R are too large to fit on a US Letter sized page when printed. 
> The same code will produce a US letter sized page when I'm on my Debian Sid 
> box. Both boxes are connected to the same shared printer, and both are 
> configured in CUPS to use US Letter paper size. When I posted a question to 
> the FC folks, the consensus was there was a configuration that needed to be 
> done in R to set the proper page for graphics exported.
>
> I've google'd for a solution and came up with a check for a locale variable 
> in /etc/sysconfig/i18n to be set to the same as for the lang variable. I 
> tried that, and the results were still incorrectly sized.
>
> Three sample graphs of the problem can be seen at this url:
>
> http://penguinsolutions.org/math108/Rexamples/Rplots.pdf
>
> Notice how the graph extends beyond the paper on the right side of each page.
>
> The command I am running from the terminal is:
>
> R <baseballsalary.R >output --vanilla -q
>
> I then read about postscript() in the documentation, so I found this sequence 
> to be successful:
>
>> postscript("testthis.ps", paper='letter')
> [...run all my same R code here...]
>> dev.off()
>> q()
>
> and then run ps2pdf testthis.ps to create the plots as I intended on US 
> letter:
>
> http://penguinsolutions.org/math108/Rexamples/testthis.pdf
>
> Notice that the graphs do not extend beyond the edge of US letter paper on 
> these plots.
>
> How do I set (in Fedora Core 1) the paper size for R to US letter, so I can 
> run my commands R <baseballsalary.R >output --vanilla -q from the terminal?

-- 
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