[R] Options for generating editable figures?

Allen McBride allencmcbride at gmail.com
Tue Jan 3 03:51:09 CET 2012


Hello all,

I'm using R to produce figures for people who want to be able to edit 
the figures directly, and who use PowerPoint a lot. I use a Mac, and I'd 
appreciate any advice about how to approach this. Here's what I've come 
up with so far:

1) I can use xfig() and then ask them to install Inkscape to edit the 
files. Downsides are no transparency and a learning curve with Inkscape.
2) I can do the same as above but with svg() instead of xfig(). But for 
reasons I don't understand, when I use svg() I can't seem to edit the 
resulting figures' text objects in Inkscape.
3) I can try to install UniConvertor, which sounds like quite a task for 
someone of my modest skills. This would supposedly allow me to create 
.wmf files, which might (and I've read conflicting things about this) be 
importable into PowerPoint as editable graphics.
4) I found an old suggestion in the archives that an EPS could be 
imported into PowerPoint and made editable. This almost worked for me 
(using Inkscape to convert a cairo_ps()-generated file to EPS) -- but 
only using PowerPoint under Windows, and lots of vectors and all text 
were lost along the way.

Am I on the right track? Am I missing any better pathways? I know 
similar questions have come up before, but the discussions I found in 
the archives were old, and maybe things have changed in recent years.

Thanks for any advice!
--Allen McBride

R version: 2.13.1
Platform: Mac OS 10.7.2



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