[R] Large plot symbols (with pch = 1 etc)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 20:23:20 +1100 (EST)
> From: John Maindonald <john.maindonald at anu.edu.au>
> 
> On my home (Windows 98) machine I find:
> > par()$cra
> [1] 42 16
> > par()$csi
> [1] 0.1666667
> > 
> 
> On my work machine I believe I had
> par()$cra
> [1] 17 16
> 
> So it looks as though R is reading the width wrongly,
> and that it is the width that is somehow used to
> determine the plot character size.
> 
> Incidentally I noted Brian's comment that R had misread
> his character dimension information wrongly.  I have a
> Matrox MM2 board on my Windows 98 (SE) machine.  
> I understand he will be using a Matrox G200.  Is there a 
> Matrox connection?

It was my laptop (our G200's are primarily Linux), and it is a NeoMagic
256. The problem was with Windows, not R: R acts on what it is told by
Windows, and that was nonsense.  I am fairly sure that problem resides
in the graphics drivers, but we need to work around it.  Not long
before the release of 0.90.0 he and I were getting very different
font and symbol sizes on our laptops from identical code.

As far as I can see in the Nov 19th change Guido changed the cra
setting to come from the character metrics.  That is, cra[1] is set to
what Windows reports as the maximum width of a character in the font.
It looks as if that is unreliable.  I think we should ask it for "O".
Incidentally, I am beginning to learn that Window 98SE is not just
a minor upgrade, so we are going to have to test on that too.

Brian

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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