[R] sprucing up the R homepage

[Finny Kuruvilla]

FYI, Peter Dalgaard's original posting from 2004 that I used is here:
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/06/1094.html

Per his suggestion, I changed the smoothing parameter to be:
"pnmsmooth -size 1 1" instead of "pnmsmooth -size 5 5" which he
originally described.  The new graphic is here:

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~finnyk/Rhome2.jpg

It is predictably, less smoothed, and does look a bit nicer.  Tim
Churches' version also looks very good.  As someone else has noted,
Tim's does have a few rough edges involving mostly margins (I had to
manually tweak them).  I also manually put the 45 in to make it look
like the original.

I'd be happy if either his or mine replaced the current version, if
there is consensus.

Best, Finny Kuruvilla

On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:14:03AM +0200, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Tim Churches wrote:
> >Finny Kuruvilla <kuruvilla at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> >  
> >>I've been a R-user for quite some time.  The graphic on the home page
> >>looks a bit in need of polish so I applied some antialiased
> >>transformations that Peter Dalgaard has previously posted to R-help
> >>for improving graphic quality.  I had to change the margins a bit, but
> >>here is what it looks like:
> >>
> >>http://www.broad.mit.edu/~finnyk/Rhome.jpg
> >>
> >>Personally, I think it looks much better.  Because people so often
> >>"judge a book by its cover" (subconsciously or consciously), I'm
> >>wondering if anyone thinks this is worthy of replacing the current
> >>version?  I want R to maximize R's appeal and albeit a small
> >>improvement, hopefully this change will help a bit!
> >>    
> >
> >If you run Eric Lecoutre's code to produce the graphic, available at 
> >http://www.r-project.org/misc/acpclust.R, unchanged except for the 
> >addition of these lines:
> >
> >library(Cairo)
> >Cairo(600,400,file="Rlogo_swiss.png",type="png",bg="white")
> >
> >then you get this:
> >
> >http://members.optusnet.com.au/tchur/Rlogo_swiss.png
> >
> >which I think looks even better. Kudos to Simon Urbanek and Jeffrey 
> >Horner for the excellent Cairo device driver for R (and which works even 
> >without an X server, which makes it great for web server applications).
> >
> >Tim C
> >  
> Yes, this looks better. Finny's version looks oversmoothed in 
> comparison. Out of academic curiosity, what happens if you diddle the 
> parameters of the smooth-and-subsample technique to use a narrower 
> smoother?
> 
> -- 
>   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
>  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
> (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 
> 35327907
> 
> 

-- 
Finny Kuruvilla, MD, PhD
Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital
Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Homepage: http://www.anchorcross.org/people/kuruvilla/