[R] Strange behaviour of R graphics copied to PowerPoint

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 02/06/2013 1:15 PM, Erling Johan Frøysa wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am using R to create graphics, especially to plot time series charts.
> These charts are then copied as metafiles (for best quality) to a PowerPoint
> presentation and then saved to PDF (via the "Save As" dialog").
>
> Attached is two pictures. The first picture shows how my chart looks like in
> the R Graphics window, and the second picture shows how the chart becomes
> after saving it to PDF.
>
> < http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4668522/R.png>
>
> < http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4668522/Rppt.png>
>
> As you can see. After saving the metafile to PDF via PowerPoint, some
> straight lines appears (it seems like all of the lines has the same origin
> in the upper left corner and ends somewhere on the times series line). This
> happens in both plot() and ggplot(). The problem appears more often when
> using daily data in my time series. With monthly data the problem don't
> exist.
>
> Have anyone experienced this before? Do you think the problem is related to
> R or to Powerpoint?

This has come up before, and it does appear to be a problem in 
Powerpoint: it doesn't export to PDF very well.  It is possible that the 
metafiles that R produces could be changed so as not to trigger this 
bug, but that would really need input from Microsoft on what changes are 
needed, and as far as I've heard, they've never made any comment or 
acknowledgment of the problem.

My advice would be to contact them; if they're unresponsive, try some 
other software (OpenOffice, LibreOffice, LaTeX+Beamer, ...).

Duncan Murdoch