[R] Preparing high quality figures with tiff as end result

[Gustaf Rydevik]

Hi all,

I'm currently preparing some figures that will be submitted to PloS One.
In their guidelines they state that they will only accept figures in
tiff or eps format, with the warning that eps figures will be
converted to tiff format ( see
http://www.plosone.org/static/figureGuidelines.action ).

Because of this conversion, I figured I'd generate tiff-format figures
from the beginning.
However, a number of issues cropped up:
1) using

library(Cairo)
CairoTIFF("test.tif")

I get " Sorry, this Cairo was compiled without tiff support.". I tried
finding out how to recompile Cairo, but got lost in a lot of confusing
talk about GTK+, downloaded dll files that I didn't know how to use
etc.

so I turned to plain tiff(), and

2) R started crashing on me.The following code

tiff("test.tif")
plot(rnorm(100))
dev.off()

,crashes R (i.e "R GUI has encountered a problem and needs to
close...") every third time or so.
When it does work, the resulting output is not too pretty.

So I turned to using postscript files. However, Plos One requires that
fonts be embedded into the figure.
embedFonts()  works for this, but the result is that text becomes
low-res bitmaps, and I don't know how to solve this.

So basically my question is: How should I go about generating graphics
that will look as nice as possible given the above constraints?

Many thanks in advance,

Gustaf




-- 
Gustaf Rydevik, M.Sci.
tel: +46(0)703 051 451
address:Essingetorget 40,112 66 Stockholm, SE
skype:gustaf_rydevik