[R] configuring graphics device in Linux

[Peter Dalgaard]

Erik Iverson wrote:
> You should begin by telling us what you did to produce the result.  That 
> way we can tell if it's something in your R commands or not.  If you 
> give us step by step instructions to reproduce the problem (with 
> simulated data, or a dataset distributed with R), it becomes much easier 
> to debug.

Good advice in general, but in this case I think John is right in 
assuming that the issue is mainly with his graphics hardware setup, and 
he did tell us about that. The R version would have been nice though; we 
have fixed various issues in this area over time.

>> i'm trying plot() from Owen's _The R Guide_ and having trouble with
>> being able to view the result. the Graphics Device 2 draws an image i
>> can only see the top part of and when i try to manipulate the window to
>> see the image, the window then says: "...ure margins too lar..." in
>> large letters. i guess it says something about picture margins too
>> large. i'm not sure how to determine all my video settings in Ubuntu
>> (8.04), what i do know is this:
>> 1280X800
>> 60Hz
>> Intel 945GM graphics
>> and according to /var/log/Xorg.0.log: DPI set to (96,96)
>>
>> i found x11(), but i'm not sure what to change there, if i should even
>> change it. can someone advise how to adjust settings, please?

These are generic symptoms of using a too large font for your display, 
but that can happen for a number of reasons.

According to your setup, the system should believe that you have an ~8 
inch screen (800/96) and the default X11 window is 7x7 inches so there 
_should_ be plenty of room, but some systems try to outsmart the user 
and use the actual physical dimensions, which could be smaller (higher 
DPI).  You might want to check with "xdpyinfo" (from the shell).

In any case, you can try reducing width, height, and (especially) 
pointsize in the call to x11() (which you'd issue _before_ the plot()). 
Or set them with X11.options().

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