[R] Options for generating editable figures?

[Greg Snow]

I have had clients who also wanted to make little changes to the graphs (mostly changing colors or line widths).  Most after doing this a couple of times have been happy to give be better descriptions of what they want so I can just do it correctly the first time.  

I mostly give them the graphs in .wmf or .emf format, however I have found that if I create the file and send it to them, most have problems getting it into word or power point, instead I usually copy and paste it into a word document and send the word document to them, they can then copy and paste from there to their presentation or report.  Of course this is only an option if you have MS word on the same computer as you are working on.  With those files double clicking takes the user into a basic editor where they can change colors, line widths, etc.  However, sometimes opening that editor will redo all the text, so what started as changing one line color also requires them to re orient all the axis and tick labels.

Inkscape is a much more capable program for doing these kinds of edits, and for basic editing it is fairly straight forward, so for your description of options below, I would suggest that you make them learn Inkscape if they really want to edit the graphs themselves.  Inkscape can also import pdf files (though it is an import rather than a simple open and you often need to ungroup a bunch of objects before editing them) so that may be another option for you.

-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at imail.org
801.408.8111


> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Allen McBride
> Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 7:51 PM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Options for generating editable figures?
> 
> 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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