[R] Making TIFF images with rtiff

[Kort, Eric]

From: Inman, Brant A.   M.D. [mailto:Inman.Brant at mayo.edu]
 
>Many medical journals and publishers require that images, whether
>photographs or line art, be submitted as high resolution .TIFF images.
>One option for R users is to produce an image in one format and to
>convert it to a .TIFF file using a second software program.  My
>experience has been that this option often results in images of poorer
>quality, often with blurry contours, and a loss of resolution.  A second
>and better option would be to make .TIFF files directly from the graphic
>output of R.  
>
>I recently noticed that there is a library called "rtiff" that may be
>able to do this.  However, I have not been able to get it to work,
>principally because I do not know how to install the required supporting
>software, libtiff and tiffio.h, correctly on my computer. I am running R
>2.4.0 on a Windows XP machine.  So far I have done the following:

If only.  Sadly, rtiff only reads tiffs, and writes pixmap objects as tiffs. 
It does not create a rendering device for capturing plots to a tiff file, in 
the way that jpeg() does for jpegs.

This very thought occurred to me a couple months ago, but I was skeptical
that the effort would be worth it.  I usually render to postscript and 
convert from there with high quality results...but this is a bit tedious and
time consuming.  Now that there are two of us in the universe who would like 
a tiff() rendering device for R, maybe it would be worth it.  It would be 
especially worth it if there was someone else conversant in the non-tiff 
specific aspects of the task.  If that would be the case I would be happy to 
code the TIFF I/O.  Lacking that, I will need to look at the requirements 
some more to verify whether I have the requisite neurons to carry it off.

To answer your installation question, all that is required for the windows 
binary to run is to copy the tiff related DLLs provided in the gnuwin binary 
package somewhere on your PATH (tiffio.h and other development files are 
not required unless you are going to build the package from source).

-Eric

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