[R] Legend problem when exporting a plot to PDF

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Tue Apr 29 14:14:16 CEST 2008


Copying between devices (as in dev2bitmap) is not a good way to produce 
high-quality graphs, and especially not if you change the size.

What is wrong with

pdf("test.pdf", width=6, height=6)
< re-run the plot commands>
dev.off()

?


On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, Julien Roux wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> When exporting to PDF a graph with a legend, in the final PDF, the text is 
> going beyond the legend box.
>> dev2bitmap("test.pdf", type="pdfwrite", h=6, w=6)
> The legend looks OK on the screen.
> I noticed that the size of the legend box depends on the size of the screen 
> window, which is not the case for other graphical parts (text of the legend, 
> title, axis text...)
> Any tip on how to deal with this?
>
> Another problem I encounter, which may be linked to this is:
> When I want to export PDFs to a given size with dev2bitmap (let's say h=3 and 
> w=3), the size of the text of x-labels, y-labels and the x-axis annotations 
> is not adjusted. The margins also keep the same size. Then if the size is too 
> small, all the text fields overlap and the result is not nice.
> How to change this? I guess it's possible since the on the screen (x11) the 
> margins are adjusted relative to the size of the plot.
>
> If you know one good tutorial to help creating ready-to-publish graphics, I 
> would appreciate the reference.
> Thanks for your help
> Julien
>
> PS:
> R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08)
> i386-apple-darwin8.10.1

With R version 2.7.0 you have other possibilities, including 
dev.copy2pdf() and quartz(type="pdf").


> -- 
> Julien Roux, PhD student
> http://www.unil.ch/dee/page22707.html
> Department of Ecology and Evolution
> Biophore, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
> tel: +41 21 692 4221    fax: +41 21 692 4165
>
> ______________________________________________
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>

-- 
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



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