[R] semi-transparency not supported in devel R? "alpha" cannot be specified in qplot()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 21/01/2012 22:39, Tengfei Yin wrote:
> Hi dear all,
>
> In my laptop(ubuntu 11.10 64bit), I maintained a released R (2.14) and a
> developmental R, I can specify qplot(..., alpha = ) in R 2.14 , but when I
> try to use transparency in developmental R, I got a warning message and the
> plot is clearly not I want.

You have not told us which device this is ....
Assuming it is X11(), most likely you built R-devel without 
cairographics suppoort.

For more information, see the R-admin list (and the posting guide: this 
is a topic for the R-devel list, so please follow up there).

> minimal example:
>> qplot(data = mtcars, x = mpg, y = cyl, alpha = cyl)
> Warning message:
> In grid.Call.graphics(L_points, x$x, x$y, x$pch, x$size) :
>    semi-transparency is not supported on this device: reported only once per
> page
>> sessionInfo()
> R Under development (unstable) (2012-01-21 r58156)
> Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>
> locale:
>   [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>   [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
>   [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
>   [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C
>   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
> [8] base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] ggplot2_0.8.9 proto_0.3-9.2 reshape_0.8.4 plyr_1.7.1
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] digest_0.5.1
>
>
> I have no idea what happened here, because if I miss some important system
> dependencies, why it's still working in R 2.14?
>
> Any suggestions or possible solution will be really appreciated. Thanks
>
> Tengfei
>


-- 
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