[R] Are there any guis out there, which will allow editing of the graph?

[Bryan Hanson]

A colleague of mine, quite by accident, discovered that Adobe Illustrator
can manipulate plots made by base graphics, and when you do, many pieces of
the plot are separate items that can be manipulated with Illustrator.  He
cuts and pastes from a Quartz window on his Mac, into Illustrator.
Apparently Illustrator has two kinds of selection arrows, one of which
selects groups of things, the other selects individual things.  He confirms
that text from R may be changed, colors in polygonal areas may be changed,
objects may be moved etc once they are selected.

Apparently he saw a notation that this was possible on some R code that went
with a Wikipedia entry, and he tried it, and it works.

YMMV. Bryan
*************
Bryan Hanson
Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry
DePauw University, Greencastle IN USA



On 8/4/08 1:09 PM, "Bert Gunter" <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:

> No. Can't be. Editable graphs require that the graph be produced via code
> that produces changeable components. All R graphs are essentially static.
> 
> That said, caveats: graphs drawn via the grid package functionality -- for
> example lattice graphs -- **are** produced via changeable code. If you read
> the lattice docs carefully, you'll see that there are a few features there
> that allow some graph editing. There may be other packages that also have
> some editing capabilties. R's base graphics also allow a little interaction
> via identify() and locator(), which can be useful (e.g. for positioning
> legends).
> 
> One can also "simulate" interactivity by recording various components of
> graph construction and then modifying and redrawing them. But this is just
> manually doing what you're looking for, so probably a dumb suggestion.
> 
> While graph editing certainly can be a nice feature, it is very difficult to
> implement without severely constraining graphing flexibility (IMO, of
> course). Graphs are very complex beasties, so it's hard to write clean code
> that allows flexibile editing capabilities. Look at S-Plus's graph editing,
> which I always found harder to use (and more buggy) than just issuing the
> commands. (To be fair, it's been some years since I tried).
> 
> Again, just my 2 bits. Others may well disagree (and perhaps point you to
> what you seek).
> 
> Cheers,
> Bert
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On
> Behalf Of Arthur Roberts
> Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 9:51 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Are there any guis out there,which will allow editing of the
> graph?
> 
> Hi, all,
> 
> I would like to know if there is any gui interface out there
> (academic or commercial) that allows one to edit R-language generated
> graphs (e.g positioning x axis labels.)  It would be nice to have
> something like the user interface of Igor or Origin.  I have already
> used JGR and R-gui.  These are good, but they don't allow one to
> easily edit graphs.  I have also tried locator() and the package
> iplots.  Your input is greatly appreciated.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Art Roberts
> University of Washington
> 
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