[R] win.metafile and Linux

[A.J. Rossini]

(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> writes:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I see that people have been discussing the win.metafile device
> on the list since before 2000.
>
> Yet I have never seen this on a Linux distribution of R.
>
> Is this because the device works by making calls (GPL calls of
> course!) to a proprietary Windows library?
>
> In that case I can understand that it would be far from kosher to
> implement it on Linux. But I'd like confirmation.
>
> I must say that being able to produce Windows metafiles on Linux
> would help to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows: often one
> needs to produce a graphic which will be imported into a Windows
> application, but while PNG and the like are quite nice they don't
> have the merit of being a vector format, and don't scale well.
>

This has been discussed before; search the mailing list archives.
There are libraries which sort-of work (used to be poorly, not sure
what the exact status is now).  No one has wanted to put in the time
for finishing a sort-of working result up to now.

Note that the same did hold true for PICT format on Macs.  Not sure if
it still does, though.

best,
-tony

-- 
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Biomedical and Health Informatics   University of Washington
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