[R] exporting high quality graphics from R in Mac OSX

[Rob Knell]

Nope, sorry, I made a mistake - it's Office vX, native for OSX. I've 
had a look around and found quite a few complaints on the 'net about 
Word X claiming to be OSX native but rendering the image as a scruffy 
bitmap, so I guess this is a Word problem. I don't want to invest in 
the newest version of MS Office, which might do it properly... maybe 
I'll hang on for the Aqua version of Open Office, so I can expunge MS 
from my hard drive.

Cheers


Rob



On 22 Jul 2004, at 13:55, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> R's PDF is indeed vector graphics.  Given that PDF is supposedly the
> native graphics representation on MacOS X, it sounds as if you are not
> using MacOS X native applications (and Office 2000 cannot be, given its
> date).  If you are indeed using classic MacOS applications then the 
> native
> graphics format is different and PDF is foreign.  Might this be as 
> simple
> as using up-to-date MacOS X versions of your other applications?
>
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Rob Knell wrote:
>
>> Hi there
>>
>> The default option for saving graphics from R (1.9.1) on my Mac is as 
>> a
>> pdf file. If I open the file in Acrobat reader it looks really good 
>> and
>> crisp, and is obviously saved as vector graphics, since I can zoom in
>> as much as I like and it continues to look really nice. If I import it
>> into MS Word (from office 2000), or Textedit, however, it imports it 
>> as
>> a bitmap and unless I save it as a pretty big image and then shrink it
>> in size by about three times after import it looks blurry and
>> pixellated. The save it as a really big picture and shrink it option 
>> is
>> bearable, but hardly elegant.
>>
>> I'm trying to persuade some other people in my department that we
>> should move to using R as a standard analysis package, and this is
>> currently one strike against it - it's difficult to export
>> decent-looking high-res graphics.
>
> Not true: the export _is_ high quality and your subject line is blaming
> the wrong tool.
>
>> If I want to persuade people to use
>> R, I need to be able to give them an easy way to do this. There are
>> some solutions like importing the text and then the graphics into
>> acrobat, or installing ghostscript and trying it with the graphics as
>> postscript, but obviously people will respond to this with 'why should
>> I waste time and or money doing this when I can just cut and paste out
>> of Excel/Statistica/Minitab'. I realise that this is arguably more of 
>> a
>> problem with Word or Textedit, but does anyone know of a good easy
>> solution to this that I can use as part of my program to evangelise my
>> colleagues?
>
> -- 
> 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
>