[R] plotting large time series

[Paul Hiemstra]

On 10/28/2011 07:21 AM, Enrico Schumann wrote:
> A simple way may be not to plot all data points. But it will depend on
> your data if that is a good idea.
>
> Regards,
> Enrico
>
> ## EXAMPLE
>
> require("zoo")
>
> ## random data
> dates <- seq(from = as.Date("2000-01-01"),
>              to   = as.Date("2011-10-31"), by = "1 day")
> x <- cumsum(rnorm(length(dates)))
>
> ## plot all
> plot(zoo(x, dates), col = "blue")
>
> ## plot every 100th point
> subs <- seq(1, length(x), by = 10)
> lines(zoo(x[subs], dates[subs]), lwd = 2)

Hi,

I would only plot every 100th line if the plot itself is unreadable
because the points obscure each other. When the problem is that the
resulting file is too big, I would favor dumping the file to 'png' file
instead of pdf. Making the dpi high enough ensures that the illustration
is still publication ready.

regards,
Paul

>
>
> Am 28.10.2011 02:46, schrieb jim holtman:
>> Try another format (tiff, jpg, etc) to see how they look, what the
>> sizes are for different resolutions.  If you have a lot of single
>> points, PDF files get very large because of the commands used to print
>> each point.  If you want to keep PDF, then find some way of
>> aggregating the data points so that you plot an "average" of several
>> of them.  Depending on what you are trying to show, I have used the
>> hexbin package to plot large numbers of points.
>>
>> Why do you need PDFs?  Will something else do?
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Agnes
>> Richard<agnes.richard at fhnw.ch>  wrote:
>>> hello,
>>>
>>> I got a problem with plotting large time series, since I want to
>>> store the
>>> results in a .PDF file (I want to store several pages of plots). The
>>> PDF
>>> files get too large to be handled (>  10MB, one was even 200MB big).
>>>
>>> So I wonder, if there would be a possibilty to either
>>> - reduce the file size of the PDF
>>> - change the way the plot is generated to reduce the plot size?
>>>
>>> I use:
>>> plot(myDate,myFile[,1],type="l",xlab="Date")
>>>
>>> using
>>> myts = as.ts(start=myDate[1],end=myDate[length(myDate)],x=myFile[,1])
>>> plot.ts(myts,xlab="Date")
>>>
>>> produces the same file size.
>>>
>>> for storing the PDF I use:
>>> pdf(file=paste(outpath,"myPDF.pdf",sep=''),paper="a4r").
>>>
>>> I would be very grateful for an answer!!!!
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>


-- 
Paul Hiemstra, Ph.D.
Global Climate Division
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)
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