[R] Change current plot window size. Or - saving/loading current device plotting history

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You haven't mentioned an OS nor a graphics device, So I will guess 
Windows and windows(), since that is commonest device with a history.

On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Tal Galili wrote:

> Hello dear R-help members,
>
> Very soon I am to give a lecture on R. And in that lecture I intend to move
> between: par(mfrow = c(1,1)) to par(mfrow = c(1,2)) back and forth.
> I anticipate this will damage the image proportions and will force me to
> resize the window.
> So far I have found it is possible to close the window and then reopen it
> (bigger/smaller) by using:
>
>
> dev.off()dev.new(width=5, height=4)plot(1:20)
>
>
> The issue with this solution is that I loose all the history I had with
> these windows.
>
> Thus, my question is either of two:
> 1) Can I resize a plot window AFTER it was created ?

Not programmatically.  But you can have more than one device open and 
switch between them by dev.next/dev.set ....

> 2) can you save and load a plot history, for between closing and opening a
> graphic device ?

Yes, from the menu.  There is also the more general 
recordPlot/replayPlot mechanism.

But note that the windows() plot history is shared between devices, so 
if you work with multiple windows their histories will be interleaved. 
It is a history _of the session_ and so you can page back into the 
history of previously opened devices.

So I would do this by opening a device with record = TRUE, and when I 
needed a different aspect ratio, open one with record = FALSE and 
close it when I was done with it.

> Thanks for any help,
> Tal
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
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