[R] 0 margin for creating eps files

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 27 May 2003, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On Tue, 27 May 2003 20:33:05 +0100 (BST), you wrote in message
> <20030527193305.52325.qmail at web41101.mail.yahoo.com>:
> 
> >Dear all,
> >
> >I am trying to create eps files of R plots (in Linux) so that I can import them into Word
> >(obviously in MS Windows). What I would like is for the files to be cropped so that there is no
> >margin around the actual plot, because I have no way of editing the files after they have been
> >created. I have tried using
> >
> >par(mai=c(.75,.75,0,0))
> >
> >in order to reduce the margin; it works fine when I create a plot on the screen, however when I
> >use
> >
> >dev.copy2eps(file="FILENAME.eps")
> >
> >to save to the eps file, the margin has returned. Could someone please tell what I am doing wrong,
> >should I be using different parameter to set the margins of the eps files.
> >
> >Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> I think the easiest way to do this is to use Ghostview to "convert to
> EPS", and have it recalculate the bounding box as it does so.  Since
> it's working with a Postscript interpreter, it does the bounding box
> calculation very accurately; playing around with margins is likely to
> lead to inconsistencies depending on labels, etc.

I don't see any need for that in my examples: R did the calculation
right to the nearest bp (and that's the accuracy of bounding boxes).

I suspect you mean GSView (on Windows): ghostview (a Unix program) does 
not AFAIK have that option.

If you just want a tight bounding box, gs's bbox device will give it to 
you.  On Unix, 

gs -sDEVICE=bbox -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q file.eps

will do something like

%%BoundingBox: 0 0 278 283
%%HiResBoundingBox: 0.000000 0.000000 277.992018 282.023991

just copy the first one into the file.  That's how all the figures in my 
books are included, for example.

-- 
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