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

[Oleg Sklyar]

For any kind of R plots that need to be inserted in office documents 
either on Windows OR on Linux you will always achieve the best result by 
using the postscript device, then converting *.ps to *.eps and inserting 
*.eps into Office (OpenOffice as well). *.eps files contain previews for 
you to edit the documents on screen, but the final output can be done 
using Print to file using a Postscript driver and converting to PDF -- 
this will ensure all your R-graphics, but also ALL of your vector 
illustrations, to be displayed in high quality vector manner.

In fact this is about the only way to put high quality plots into 
presentations or word processing documents (ANY, MSOffice included). In 
general it works easier on Linux because you will have all tools in the 
repository and for free. On Windows you will probably end up using 
Distiller, which costs quite a lot or FreePdfXP if it still exists and 
works correctly.

There is only one place where Windows, or for that sake Mac, scores 
better, and yet not ultimately: if you want to draw or design vector 
illustrations then you have larger selection of tools on Windows (Corel, 
Illustrator, Xara etc), on Mac - Illustrator and on Linux - InkScape 
(recommnded) and Xara.

Now if you go this way, the workflow looks like:

 > postscript("fig1.ps", width=5,height=5)
 > plot(x~y)
 > dev.off()
 > q()
$ ps2eps --ignoreBB --gsbbox -r 300 -R + -f fig1.ps  # 300dpi thumbnail
$ ooffice
   - import eps file, you will see the same as usual hi-res preview
   - Print, print to file, on request "Reduce Transparency" - YES
$ ps2pdf13 mydoc.ps

result: mydoc.pdf

For presentations simply use US Letter landscape instead of A4 for paper 
size and printing (to file) and this will nicely fit into the screen 
with minimal loss of space.

If the question is in the impossibility to do things on Linux: Windows 
will not help you to do the above -- there are no tools. You may find 
another solution, but for the quality of output the above is the best. 
Other formats, like WMF, EMF, AI, CDR are either of no good use for 
anything (the first 2) or are incompatible with Office (AI, CDR).

Moreover, using InkScape and RSvgDevice you can create SVG plots to 
which you can add whatever illustrations you want just in the same 
document because SVG is native for InkScape.

Oleg

PS. If you want to see examples of how such plots and illustrations look 
like (created fully on Linux with the above workflow, drop me a line, I 
will send a PDF).

Dalphin, Mark wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Thomas Lumley wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Yes, indeed. However, this fact is of limited help when working on another
> 
>> operating system, which was the focus of the original question.
>>
>> 	-thomas
> 
> One solution which has not been covered here is to use both operating
> systems. For example, I need to present in Powerpoint, yet my work is
> done under Linux where I have substantially more RAM and CPU
> power. Typically, I'll run my analysis under Linux and then take
> advantage of the binary compatibility of the .RData file and move my
> final values from Linux to Windows via Samba; I may delete large
> intermediate results before the transfer to compendate for my lack of
> RAM under Windows.  Some small scripts which may have been developed
> under Linux are used to create the plots which are placed in my
> Powerpoint presentations. By an large, the plots developed under Linux
> drop right into the Windows presentations, although there are
> occasional font size difficulties that require adjustments.
> 
> Mark Dalphin
> 
> ----------------------
> Mark Dalphin
> Dept Comp Biol, M/S AW2/D3262
> Amgen, Inc.
> 1201 Amgen Court W
> Seattle, WA 98119
> 
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-- 
Dr Oleg Sklyar | EBI-EMBL, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK | +44-1223-494466