[R] R GUI dies using postcript() in Windows XP Pro

[Prof Brian Ripley]

What do you think font.main=16 does?  postscript() only has 5 fonts.

Fortunately your example also crashes on Linux so was fairly easy to track 
down.

The windows devices do have more fonts (19 by default).

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Gavin Simpson wrote:

> Dear List,
> 
> My colleague has been having a problem with the following data and 
> plotting commands. The example below is part of a larger set of plots, 
> but I've isolated the problem to this example using this small dataset 
> (below), which kills rgui consistently. My version info
> 
>  > version
>           _
> platform i386-pc-mingw32
> arch     i386
> os       mingw32
> system   i386, mingw32
> status
> major    1
> minor    8.0
> year     2003
> month    10
> day      08
> language R
> 
> But this also happens in 1.8.1 on Windows XP Pro
> 
> The code seems to stop at the call to plot() in the code below, and then 
> MS's error reporting window pops up and informs us that rgui has been 
> closed.
> 
> Note that the same code, but without the postcript() and dev.off() 
> commands works as expected to produce the plot on a windows device.
> 
> Any ideas as to what is going on?
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Gav
> 
> #code to run to reproduce the problem
> year <- c(1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 
> 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002)
> 
> avgMsr <- c(10.800000, 7.000000, 6.200000, 9.571429, 10.800000, 
> 11.600000, 10.200000, 11.400000, 7.200000, 9.400000, 11.200000, 
> 11.600000, 11.600000, 8.000000, 7.600000)
> 
> totMsr <- c(19, 17, 13, 24, 17, 17, 21, 18, 13, 15, 19, 18, 21, 15, 11)
> 
> postscript(file="invert.eps", onefile=FALSE, horizontal = FALSE, 
> pointsize = 8)
> 
> op <- par(mar = c(3,4,1.5,1)+0.1,font.main=16,tcl=-0.2)
> plot(x = year, y = avgMsr, ylab = "Species richness", main = "Loch Coire 
> nan Arr", axes = FALSE, ylim = c(0,25), xlim = c(1988,2002))
> axis(2, las=1)
> axis(1)
> lines(x = year, y = avgMsr)
> points(x = year, y = totMsr , col = "black", pch = 19, type = "o")
> lines(x = year, y = totMsr)
> box()
> par(op)
> dev.off()
> 

-- 
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