[R-SIG-Mac] R EPS graphics and PDFs from Word Documents (Jose Garcia)

[Dr. Jose A. Garcia]

> On Nov 3, 2006, at 7:32 PM, Dan Putler wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > This is likely to be viewed as being at the margins of acceptable for
> > this list, but I've run into an issue that I can't find a way around.
> > Specifically, I'm working with a Windows based co-author, who is also
> > MS Word based. So far I've found that we get the best graphic quality
> > using EPS graphic files created by R. The problem is that when I just
> > use the standard way of getting a PDF of the Word document by saving
> > the file as a PDF in the main print dialog, the resulting PDF has the
> > grayed warning box indicating that the graphic can't be seen on
> > screen. If I instead use the option to convert the PDF to PostScript,
> > and then convert the resulting PostScript file back to PDF using
> > Preview, I get the graphics the way they should be. I can see them on
> > screen, and so can anyone else. I can print them on one of my
> > PostScript printers, but when folks on Windows go to print these PDFs
> > to a PCL printer the output is a string of Ss. I then tried taking
> > the PS files and converting them to PDFs using ghostscript (ESP's OS
> > X port of gs 7.07 available from Gimp-Print). This causes all the
> > graphics to come through properly, but the text is gibberish. I did
> > get what appears to be a clean conversion via CERN's document service
> > (but in A4, which is a problem in Canada and the US).
> >
> > Has anyone run into this problem and discovered the work-around that
> > seems to be eluding me?
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
> >


Microsoft Word does not handle EPS nor PDF graphics properly. If you
want to embed your graphic in a word document, the best option is to
save as jpeg from R. The quality of the figure is good enough.

However, if you are working for a publication, then most probably they
will be asking for a EPS. In that case, wrote your paper in Word and
do not try to insert the figures in the document. Send them as both
EPS and PDF individual files instead.

I do think that the best option for a paper is to use LaTeX. The best
figures in R are generated using postscript (EPS) which can be
inserted very well on LaTeX documents.

Cheers,

-- 
Jose A. Garcia, Ph.D.
Keck Graduate Institute
535 Watson Drive
Claremont, CA 91711
(909)-607-9254