[R] Creating publication-quality plots for use in Microsoft Word

Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz at me.com
Wed Sep 15 17:07:20 CEST 2010


That approach will be unique to OSX, upon which PDF is a default format. You can copy and paste from a PDF document using Preview into Office or iWork or similar apps. However, when subsequently displaying that content on a non-OSX system, the content will be shown as a bitmap not as the vector based PDF. You would have to save the new document to a new PDF file via the printer dialogs, in order to retain the full high quality PDF content.

The ultimate question for the OP is what do you intend to do with the Word document relative to displaying/printing the content in the Word document?

Using EMF/WMF is one way to get vector based images from R into other Windows apps and typically that provides suitable quality.

However, if you truly want "publication quality", then you would need to use encapsulated postscript (EPS) for which you can see ?postscript and pay attention to the Details section for proper creation.

However, after importing an EPS image into Word on Windows, you will not see the EPS based image, but a bitmapped preview. You would then have to print the document to a PS compatible printer to see the vector based content in the imported image in the output.

So it all depends upon how you plan to use the document.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz

On Sep 15, 2010, at 9:50 AM, Bryan Hanson wrote:

> There's many ways to solve this, but you are close to one already:  Make the
> pdf, put the cursor where you want it in the document, then on the menu bar
> Insert --> Picture --> From File... And navigate to the file.  This works on
> the Mac, and seems to store the picture internally in a different way that
> selecting the graphic in a viewer and cutting and pasting.  Quality is
> top-notch and the graphic is clickable to be resized (and retains it's
> quality).
> 
> HTH.  Bryan
> *************
> 
> On 9/15/10 10:38 AM, "dadrivr" <dadrivr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> 
>> I am trying to make some publication-quality plots for use in Microsoft
>> Word, but I am having trouble creating high-quality plots that are supported
>> by Microsoft Word.
>> 
>> If I use the R plot function to create the figure, the lines are jagged, and
>> the picture is not of high quality (same with JPEG(), TIFF(), and PNG()
>> functions).  I have tried using the Cairo package, but it distorts my dashed
>> lines, and the win.metafile results in a picture of terrible quality.  The
>> only way I have succeeded in getting a high quality picture in a file is by
>> using the pdf() function to save the plot as a pdf file, but all my attempts
>> to convert the image in the pdf file to a TIFF or other file type accepted
>> by Word result in considerably degraded quality.  Do you have any
>> suggestions for creating publication-quality plots in R that can be placed
>> in Word documents?  What packages, functions (along with options), and/or
>> conversions would you use?  Thanks so much for your help!
>



More information about the R-help mailing list