[R] hclust graphics - plotting many points

[Karin Lagesen]

Hello.

I have a distance matrix with lots of distances that I use hclust to
organise. I then plot the results using the plot method of hclust.

However, the plot itself takes around 20 mins to make due to there
being ~700 things in the matrix that I have distances for. I thus
would like to dump this to some graphics format which will let me
examine this further.

I tried dumping it to postscript:

postscript("myfile.ps", height = 50, pointsize=5)
plot(my_hc_object)
dev.off()

What happens is that since most of the items in the matrix have a
distance of zero to something everything just becomes a black smear on
the bottom where I cannot distinguish anything from anything else. I
thus tried increasing the heigth and/or width and also downscaling the
pointsize. None of these improved anything much. 

So, now I am wondering if any of you have any tips for how I can get
something like I get in the x11() window which I can also store and
potentially show other people.

Thanks!

Karin
-- 
Karin Lagesen, PhD student
karin.lagesen at medisin.uio.no
http://folk.uio.no/karinlag