[Rd] Bug using X11 on mac osx (for jpeg or png creation) (PR#10800)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008, Benilton Carvalho wrote:

> It's not a bug and it is my understanding that it's documented.
>
> From the man page on jpeg:
>
>   They may not be usable unless the X11 display is available to the owner of 
> the R process.
>
> and later:
>
>    'bitmap' provides an alternative way to generate PNG and JPEG
>    plots that does not depend on accessing the X11 display but does
>    depend on having GhostScript installed.  (Devices 'GDD' in CRAN
>    package 'GDD' and 'CairoJPEG' / 'CairoPNG' in CRAN package 'Cairo'
>    are alternatives using several other additional pieces of
>    software.)
>
> So, the idea is to replace your jpeg() call by bitmap() (with the appropriate 
> "type" argument.

He may have a slightly different version: he seems to have access to X11 
but no fonts available.  That is not an R bug: it may well be an Apple 
bug (we've seen similar things on Ubuntu, and there are lots of known 
issues with Apple's X11).

[BTW: it is better to report the exact French messages: we can look them 
up in the translations database.  Or even better, start R with LANGUAGE=en 
and report the English message.  I suspect this one is

     could not find any X11 fonts\nCheck that the Font Path is correct.

as that seems the closest match.  And if so the advice in that English 
message is the key to solving this.]

>
> b
>
> On Feb 19, 2008, at 8:25 AM, bonneaud at enib.fr wrote:
>
>> Full_Name: Stephane Bonneaud
>> Version: 2.6.2
>> OS: OSX - Leopard 10.5.2
>> Submission from: (NULL) (195.221.233.130)
>> 
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I have a R code file containing the following code:
>> 
>> -------
>> # This code is in r2jpg.r
>> # myData is filled here with some data from a file
>> jpeg(filename="test.jpg",width=960,height=720,pointsize=16,quality=100)
>> plot(myData,xlab="anything", ylab="whatever",type="b",col="red", lwd=4)
>> dev.off()
>> -------
>> 
>> I executed this code within both the R GUI and the command line. When 
>> launched
>> through the R GUI (Mac OS X Cocoa GUI - GUI 1.22-devel (4844) (4844)),
>> everything works just fine. The JPEG file is generated just I want. Great!
>> The problem is when I try to execute the code through the command line in
>> Terminal (OSX).
>> I execute my code using the following command :
>> cat r2jpg.r | R --silent --no-restore --no-save
>> 
>> And I get the following error:
>> 
>>> jpeg(filename="test.jpg",width=960,height=720,pointsize=16,quality=100)
>> can't find X11 font
>> Error in X11(paste("jpeg::", quality, ":", filename, sep = ""), width,  :
>> impossible to start the peripheral JPEG
>> Calls: jpeg
>> 
>> (Sorry, I translated the error messages from french so it might be a little
>> different in english. If needed I can print it in english though)
>> 
>> I saw that several persons had this problem, but did not find any proper
>> solution. Therefore, I tried to launch my command from xterm (still in OSX) 
>> and
>> not in Terminal, and it worked. There is definitely an issue with R getting 
>> the
>> proper environment variables for X11 or something like that when launched 
>> from
>> the command line in Terminal.
>> When you launch the GUI, OSX detects it will need X11 (or something like 
>> this
>> :b), therefore all proper env variables are charged. From xterm, obviously 
>> the
>> proper env variables are set.
>> 
>> How could R tell OSX to link with X11 when launched from command line in
>> Terminal?
>> 
>> PS: sorry, it might be a leopard bug, but I thought somebody could be 
>> interested
>> in the R community. And maybe R developers might actually be able to do
>> something.
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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