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

[George W. Gilchrist]

I almost always do a bit of tweaking of my R graphics (output as postscript
files) using Adobe Illustrator. The latest version has the option of saving
the file "For Microsoft Office..." under the File menu. The resulting *.png
file comes up clean in PowerPoint or in Word.

Cheers, George
 


On 7/22/04 7:25 AM, "Rob Knell" <R.Knell at qmul.ac.uk> 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. 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?
> 
> Thanks for any help
> 
> Rob Knell
> 
> 

==================================================================
George W. Gilchrist                        Email #1: gwgilc at wm.edu
Department of Biology, Box 8795          Email #2: kitesci at cox.net
College of William & Mary                    Phone: (757) 221-7751
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795                    Fax: (757) 221-6483
http://gwgilc.people.wm.edu/