[R] Make plots with GNUplot. Have anyone tried that?

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "LH" == Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:54:56 +0100 writes:

    >> If you still want to then read ?write.table, that can export your data
    >> into a spreadsheet-like ascii format which can be used from GNUplot
    >> easily.

    LH> Very interesting.

    LH> So if I e.g. write:
    LH> ts.sim <- arima.sim(list(order = c(1,1,0), ar = 0.7), n = 200)
    LH> ts.plot(ts.sim)

    LH> How do I know the names of the rows to put in the data.frame() command?

    >> Btw, comparing the graphics capabilities of GNUplot and R, it is
    >> something like a three-wheel bicycle and a spaceship. Guess
    >> which is which.

    LH> =) I know that I will most likely spend a lot of time on just making
    LH> the plots, but I atleast (for now =) ) think it could be fun to try.

if you make them with R, yes.

I wholeheartedly support Gabor's point:

I'd consider GNUplot to be clearly inferior to R -- just talking
about the graphics possibilties and the quality / thoughtfulness
in the high-level plotting.
If you have your data / objects / functions in R,
I'm very strongly convinced that using GNUplot for plotting is 
``the wrong'' approach by almost all definitions of "wrong".

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich