[R] Making TIFF images with rtiff

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Kort, Eric wrote:
> 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

Some journals are not really serious about the TIFF rule and will accept 
postscript or pdf anyway.

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University