[R] Options for generating editable figures?

[Allen McBride]

Thank you for the advice; this is very helpful. I will see how they feel 
about installing Inkscape. I'll also work on getting R installed in a 
Windows environment so I can produce .emf and .wmf files. I found one 
old message on this list from someone who had luck doing this by running 
R with Wine. (When you say you mostly give them graphs in .wmf or .emf, 
I'm assuming you have a Windows machine? If I'm wrong and you have some 
other way of producing these files, please let me know. I almost got 
pstoedit/libemf working through MacPorts, but it messes up the line 
widths and characters pretty bad.)

Thanks,
--Allen


On 1/3/12 12:47 PM, Greg Snow wrote:
> 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.
>