[R] Using graphics straight from R into published articles

[baptiste auguie]

Hi,

For most purposes, I find that R graphics get 95% of the work done
towards final publication. A couple of personal comments,

- lattice, ggplot2, RColorBrewer, evidently. ggplot2, in particular,
makes really good aesthetic decisions by default.

- whilst R devices are really good, I find there is not yet a perfect
device that combines all the features I need; thus, I may choose
between pdf, eps (when the editor is old-school), tikzDevice (when the
graph contains labels or mathematical expressions not well rendered by
the R graphics engine). I used to use png for large colour-scale
image()s, but I find recently that the rasterImage / grid.raster
functions offer a better alternative on devices that support it
(typically pdf, but not yet tikzDevice).

- I find there is a fine trade-off between having a fully-reproducible
graph from a script (a good thing), and the legibility of that script
if it has to include all the tedious fiddling with that may be
required for final publication. I produced lattice graphs in the past
that required more than ten lines of code, and found the code really
difficult to follow or reuse later if, say, the coordinates range of
the data had changed.
If the script grows too large because I need to tweak the coordinates
of many annotations manually by trial-and-error, I usually strip down
the graph to its minimal content and add the annotations manually in
Illustrator. The data and its mapping to the axes are always fully
reproducible (that's the important part), but aesthetic decisions are
often easier to control in a what-you-click-is-what-you-do program.

My 2 cents,

baptiste


On 30 March 2011 05:31, blanco <benjamin at ru.is> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have been working with R for the past couple of years; analyzing data and
> producing some graphics.
>
> I was just wondering if people use graphics from R straight into articles or
> are they always edited  in some way; fonts, headers, axis, color etc?  Using
> photoshop or some other programs?
>
> I would like to think it is possible, better and more profession to do it
> all in R.
> I tried google and the search option but found nothing on the topic.
>
> What are the experiences for all the professionals out there that use R?
> Are there any articles on this specific subject?
>
> thanks,
> blanco
>
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