[R] MacOS X Quartz Rendering?

[Neil Gunther]

I just tried rendering a plot of 166 data point (time series) on my PPC mac,
and compared it with the same data rendered by Mathematica. The R plotting is 
very slow to paint and repaint, compared to Mathematica. This also makes it 
extremely awkward to use in other documentation such as pdfLatex.

On closer inspection, it looks like the Mathematica plot is just a polyline, 
while in R it is a B-spline with each marker consisting of 24 B-splines knotted 
together. Moreover, the spline joints are rounded, which requires computing two 
circles and intersecting them 26 times at each bend.

Is there some reason why the point-markers are not just drawn as circles or 
squares, instead of doing these complicated and time-consuming knots?

-- njg
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