[R] Plot Fonts in Windows vs Mac OSX

Sean Carmody seancarmody at gmail.com
Sat Jul 4 00:09:27 CEST 2009


Thanks for the reponse Winston. Your chart
(http://stdout.org/~winston/X/r-antialias/pch.html) illustrates my
problem perfectly. I did experiment with Cairo, with no success in
improving the display. In the blog post you linked to, the following
comment appeared:

"If you don't have anti-aliasing on your system (and can't recompile R
to enable it), you can use the poor-man's anti-aliasing trick:
generate the graph in double the resolution, and display it at half
the size."

Does this mean that the standard Windows binary for R is not compiled
with anti-aliasing enabled? Also, I have tried the trick of using
larger graphics reduced in the browser, but I have found that the
results look a little blurry. I am yet to produce a png plot on
Windows that looks anything like as good as the ones produced on the
Mac.

Regards,
Sean.

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Winston
Chang<winstonchang2008 at u.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Sean Carmody <seancarmody at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have been plotting the same charts using png on a Windows machine
>> and on a Mac OSX and the quality of the resulting images, particularly
>> in relation to the fonts, look far superior in the plots produced on
>> the Mac. Is there any way I can enhance the quality of the plots
>> produced on the Windows machine? I have also tried using win.metafile
>> on the Windows machine and the quality looks the same as the png. The
>> obvious solution would be to just use the Mac, but that's not an
>> option in the office!
>>
>> I have been searching the archives on this topic to no avail (although
>> I can vouch for the perspicacity of my choice of search terms), so any
>> help would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Your issue probably has to do with antialiasing. See number 8 in this list:
> http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/01/10-tips-for-making-your-r-graphics-look-their-best.html
> You can supposedly work around it using the Cairo package and CairoPNG()
> instead of png(), as shown here:
> http://www.mailund.dk/index.php/2009/01/25/antialias-plotting-in-r-using-cairo/
>
> However, in my experience, the fonts don't work right in Windows XP with
> CairoPNG. You can see it in this chart I made using different rendering
> methods on different platforms (scroll down to CairoPNG).
> http://stdout.org/~winston/X/r-antialias/pch.html
> I posted about a related issue a little while back but never got a
> response.... hopefully someone else will be able to explain how to make it
> work!
> -Winston
>



-- 
Sean Carmody

The Stubborn Mule
http://www.stubbornmule.net
http://twitter.com/seancarmody




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