[R] How to improve the quality of curve/line plots?

[Uwe Ligges]

Wolf, Michael wrote:

> Dear list,
> 
> I'm using the windows version of R. When plotting a curve or a line for time series with annual data , e. g. GDP growth 1991-2003, the line seems to exist of a lot of smaller lines. Printing the results the curves and lines seems to be "unclean" (because of using small resolution bitmaps?). Comparing the result of R with the same results of Excel the lines in excel seems to havve a higher qualitiy. In Excel you also can produce curves instead of lines.
> 
> Are there any possibilities how to improve the quality of the plots in R? How can R be influenced to plot "clean" lines with a higher resolution on the screen (I think it's not a question of the pdf- or png command.). Perhaps, it's a problem of the graphical possibilites of R because the most line plots which can be seen on the web have these problems.

Can you specify an example please? I cannot remember any "unclean" plot. 
In particular, no bitmaps are used to render graphics in R.

What I guess is that you have a line plot and each observation is 
connected with the subsequent one by a line. If you want to smooth it 
(and you think smoothing is appropriate here), you have to apply a 
smoothing technique before plotting.

Uwe Ligges


> Thanks,
> 
> Dr. Michael Wolf
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