[R-SIG-Mac] R-Tcl/Tk on MacOS X

[James Wettenhall]

Jan,

Thanks-very much for your reply.  I'll definitely advise 
MacOS X participants in our microarray workshop to use X11 
Tcl/Tk, i.e. I'll tell them NOT TO install the 
Tktable extension from TclTkAquaBI, but to instead INSTALL IT 
FROM http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/limmaGUI/

My R-Tcl/Tk GUI does use tkrplot quite a lot, so it is limited 
to X11 at the moment, but I will add an option soon, so that the 
user can choose between tkrplot and the regular R graphics 
device for all plots.

One thing I have in my tkrplot windows is a File menu with 
options to save the plot as PNG, JPEG, PDF etc.  Rgui in Windows 
provides this automatically when using the regular R graphics 
device.  On Linux/X11, things are a bit more complicated because 
of the difference between png() and bitmap().  png() should 
work as long as you have a valid DISPLAY for X11, but I 
seem to remember having problems at some stage with my 
R-Tcl/Tk GUI with png() on Linux/X11 so I switched to 
bitmap(), which creates PNGs indirectly via ghostscript, 
so they don't looks as good, but they can be created 
without an X11 DISPLAY.  (But then how could I have 
been running R-Tcl/Tk without a valid X11 DISPLAY???)

I suppose on MacOS X, png() etc. should always work.

I've just asked my administrator to install R 1.9.1 on a Mac, 
so I guess I'll soon find out how this issue (of being able to 
easily save PNGs etc.) compares between tkrplot and the regular 
graphics device for my R-Tcl/Tk GUI running in R 1.9.1 on 
MacOS X.

Regards,
James