[R] LaTeX consistent publication graphics from R and Comparison of GLE and R

[Marc Schwartz]

On Oct 5, 2012, at 3:32 PM, clangkamp <christian.langkamp at gmxpro.de> wrote:

> Hi Everyone
> 
> I am at the moment preparing my thesis and am looking at producing a few
> Organigrams / Flow charts (unrelated to the calculations in R) as well as a
> range of charts (barcharts, histograms, ...) based on calculations in R. 
> 
> For the Organigrams I am looking at an Opensource package called GLE at
> sourceforge, which produces the text part in Latex figures which is very
> neat and also in the same style of the thesis, which I wrote in LaTeX. It
> also offers a range of graphical features, and I am quite tempted.
> 
> It also produces barcharts and histograms with the options of legends etc. I
> have done most of my graphs so far with R, but with Organigrams and flow
> charts I am at a loss (A pointer here would also be very welcome). For some
> charts I have used MS Visio, but it would be convenient to use just one
> program for graphing throughout the thesis (i.e. same colour coding etc.).
> 
> Does anybody have any experience with GLE, ideally working with it with CSV
> tables generated within R ? Or does there exist another way to generate
> 'visually LaTeX consistent' graphics within R ?
> 
> Any takers ?



If you are comfortable in LaTeX, I would suggest that you look at PSTricks:

  http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi

I use that for creating subject disposition flow charts for clinical trials with Sweave. I can then use \Sexpr{}'s to fill in various annotations in the boxes, etc. so that all content is programmatically created in a reproducible fashion.

There are some examples of flow charts and tree diagrams here:

  http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi?file=pst-node/psmatrix/psmatrix#flowchart

and there are various other online resources for using PSTricks.

Keep in mind that since this is PostScript based, you need to use a latex + dvips + ps2pdf sequence, rather than just pdflatex.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz