[R] Hardware for a new Workstation for best performance using R

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 3/19/07, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Andrew Perrin wrote: (in part)
> >
> > 2.) Yes, by all means you should use linux instead of windows. The
> > graphics output is completely compatible with whatever applications you
> > want to paste them into on Windows.
>
> This turns out not to be the case.
>
> It is not trivial to produce good graphics off Windows for adding to
> Microsoft Office documents (regrettably an important case for many
> people).  There has been much discussion of this on the R-sig-mac mailing
> list, for example, where PNG bitmaps (at sufficiently high resolution)
> seem to be the preferred method.

On Windows one can produce metafile output directly from R.  This
is a Windows vector graphics format so it retains resolution under expansion
and shrinkage and it also works well with Microsoft Office.  This
would likely give
superior results (maximum resolution, more flexibility in post processing,
easier to do, interfaces better with Office) to using and transferring graphics
from another OS, particularly png which is only bit-mapped rather than
vector-based.