[Rd] R bug or ghostscript bug or my bug?

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Tue Jan 20 12:39:16 CET 2009


I think you are misusing 'distill' here.  The canonical distiller is 
Adobe Acrobat's. and that converts ps to pdf.

I've tried your example, and Acrobat can optimize it (probably what 
you wanted) and if I convert it to .eps in Acrobat, Distiller can 
distill it.

So, nothing wrong with R's pdf files (yet again).

(For completeness, I used Acrobat 9 Pro.)

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, ivo welch wrote:

> Dear R developers:
>
> The following R program produces a pdf file that does not survive
> ghostscript distillation correctly.  The undistilled version is at
> http://welch.econ.brown.edu/temp/try.PDF while the distilled version
> is at http://welch.econ.brown.edu/temp/try.pdf .  When previewed, the
> points are wrong in the distilled .pdf version, but only in one of the
> two points invokations (huh?) .  The program that generated the pdf
> files is
>
> x= 1:10; y1= x; y2= y1/2;
>
> plot.one = function( x, y ) {
>  lines( x, y, col="blue");
>  points( x, y, col="blue", pch=21, cex=1);
> }
>
> pdf(file = "try.PDF")
>
> plot(0, type="n", xlim=c(1,10), ylim=c(1,10))
>
> plot.one( x, y1 )
> plot.one( x, y2)
>
> dev.off()
>
> system("ps2pdf14  try.PDF try.pdf")  # distillation.
>
> -----------------------------
>
> Obviously, the error can be in ghostscript, not in R.  Or it can be
> that R produces a pdf file that has some slight problems that do not
> usually show up, except when distilled.
>
>
> Before I get too badly flamed, feel free to ignore this.  I am just
> trying to help.  It took me some time to whittle down the program to
> isolate the problem.
>
>
> R was invoked under OSX via "R --vanilla" and is version 2.8.1.
>
> ghostscript is 8.62 (2008-02-29) under OSX.
>
> (It should be easy to check whether this also occurs under linux.)
>
> /iaw
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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



More information about the R-devel mailing list