[R] pdf() device uses fonts to represent points - data alteration?

[Gavin Simpson]

On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 20:18 +0100, Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I had the same problem. When opening PDFs with a recent developer 
> version of inkscape all circles were replaced by the letter "q", see a 
> screenshoot of the imported figure:
> 
> http://www.simecol.de/figs/R_pdf_inkscape.png

For what it is worth, I've noticed for some time (since I installed
Fedora 7 on my laptop) this "feature" when viewing pdf figures in the
Gnome default pdf viewer Evince.

I put this down to an Evince problem as the same figures opened on my
work machine in an older version of Evince appear without the "q". The
files in question were generated using the same version of R and just
synchronised between machines, so there are no R-version-differences
involved here either.

What further convinced me that it was an Evince problem was that Kpdf
and Adobe Acrobat Reader all render the points as circles not "q"'s.

However, given this thread perhaps I was to quick to think Evince was
doing something wrong.

G

> 
> I spent at least two hours trying different development versions of 
> inkscape, different versions of R, reading docs, trying different 
> machines, installing fonts etc., finally giving up. Now, the two 
> workarounds of Paul Murrell indeed solved the problem for *me*. Thank 
> you. Here are example results of workarounds (i) and (ii):
> 
> http://www.simecol.de/figs/R_ps_pdf_inkscape.png
> 
> or
> 
> http://www.simecol.de/figs/R_pdftrans_inkscape.png
> 
> One problem remains. I wanted to demonstrate post-editing PDFs with 
> inkscape to motivate students to use R for graphics even if they dont 
> want to "become programmers". However, double conversion (via 
> postscript) or the magics of transparency and opaqueness are not yet the 
> way to increase the trust of point-and-click users to R. Maybe this is a 
> topic for r-devel?
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
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