[R] transparency?

[ivo_welch-rstat8303@mailblocks.com]

dear R wizards:

I am getting to play more and more with fun fonts (irony warning).  I 
now know that I can safely use my TeXtext encoding with the postscript 
device, but not with the pdf device.  Unfortunately, I believe that the 
postscript device does not support translucent colors---or is there a 
version parameter (like the version="1.4" that I need with the pdf 
device) that would permit the use of translucent colors?

Right now, it seems that my choice either TeX encoding or translucence? 
  [there turns out to be another reason why I prefer the pdf to the 
postscript device.  ps2pdf13 seems to lose the bounding box, at least 
sometimes.  it seems to like to create one page and one page only.]

And let me add---thank you very mcuh paul murrell and brian ripley for 
helping me figure out how to get the lucida fonts to work under R.  
highly appreciated.

Regards,

/iaw

---
ivo welch


Suggestion to the R graphics folks:

* Why is R's default device pdf v1.1 ?  this was Acrobat version 2.0, 
isn't it?  we are now at version 7.  wouldn't it be useful to make the 
default 1.4 at this point?  acrobat version 5.0 would seem a reasonable 
default assumption these days.

* There is a bug (R segfaults) when afm files are not found.

* When something does not work, such as encoding that is not supported, 
it would be nice to print a warning.

       --- I should also email this to the ghostscript 7.07 folks.  If 
there is no Fontmap, they silently replace fonts.
             It is wonderful that they do replace, but they should print 
a warning " Font xyz not found, thus replacing
            it with Font abs."

The lack of good errors made it doubly hard to figure out the workings, 
and without the help of the aforementioned two angels, I would not have 
had a chance to figure it out.