[R] Creating publication-quality plots for use in Microsoft Word

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:38 AM, dadrivr <dadrivr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am trying to make some publication-quality plots for use in Microsoft
> Word, but I am having trouble creating high-quality plots that are supported
> by Microsoft Word.
>
> If I use the R plot function to create the figure, the lines are jagged, and
> the picture is not of high quality (same with JPEG(), TIFF(), and PNG()
> functions).  I have tried using the Cairo package, but it distorts my dashed
> lines, and the win.metafile results in a picture of terrible quality.  The
> only way I have succeeded in getting a high quality picture in a file is by
> using the pdf() function to save the plot as a pdf file, but all my attempts
> to convert the image in the pdf file to a TIFF or other file type accepted
> by Word result in considerably degraded quality.  Do you have any
> suggestions for creating publication-quality plots in R that can be placed
> in Word documents?  What packages, functions (along with options), and/or
> conversions would you use?  Thanks so much for your help!


Those are all bitmapped formats. For best quality you want a
vector-based format. This link here discusses the difference:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070221152152/http://www.stc-saz.org/resources/0203_graphics.pdf

Microsoft's metafile formats are vector formats that work well in
Word.  Try savePlot with type = "wmf" or type = "emf" as the argument
or right click a graphic in R and choose one of the metafile options.


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