[R-SIG-Mac] PDF-viewer device?

[Byron Ellis]

I agree, I want to drag things into Illustrator or Keynote and have 
everything look pretty. I have little hope for Word though. :-)

Actually, this is what the original StatPaper (from more than a year 
ago) did---it actually stored everything in an NSPDFImageRep and then 
just threw it up on the screen. It should be easy to make the current 
Cocoa device to do this since we can grab a real PDF from the NSView I 
think. failing that we can just double buffer and use the NSPDFImageRep 
(and maybe turn off NSView's offscreen buffer to save some memory), the 
actual graphics calls remain identical---we just [lock] and [unlock] a 
different context. Towards this end I've also been trying to exactly 
match the PDF device with the Cocoa device (whose commandline in the 
version I'm moving to R-Cocoa lets you specify the ObjC class used for 
the calls, which is kinda cool)


On Aug 18, 2004, at 9:47 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> Byron,
>
> since you had a look at that Cocoa graphics device - I have an idea 
> for you :). The main drawback of all devices so far is that you have 
> no way of getting consistent good-quality output of the plot. You can 
> take a snapshot (bad quality) or you can re-run the display list in 
> another device (different results), but you have never a true WYSIWYG. 
> However on a Mac we can get this: use the regular PDF graphics device 
> and render the file output in a widget. The big advantage is that you 
> can tweak your plot commands so the plot looks the way you like it, 
> you see the result and furthermore you know this is what you get in 
> print, too. Presumably it should be possible to build a NSView (or 
> whatever basis is convenient) to display a PDF file. The device itself 
> would just generate the PDF via the pdf device and display it. 
> Resizing etc. should work as expected thus giving you a true WYSIWYG 
> experience. What do you think? Sure it's not the most efficient way, 
> but finally I could actually see what my plot would look like in the 
> publication - something which is a pain atm :). I wanted to look into 
> this myself, but I have no time atm :( But maybe your Cocoa basis 
> device would allow this easily if slightly modified.. or even your 
> existing device could maybe switch between the "native" and PDF mode 
> ...
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
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---
Byron Ellis (bellis at hsph.harvard.edu)
"Oook" -- The Librarian