[R-SIG-Mac] sizing of quartz

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 6 Apr 2008, [Ricardo Rodriguez] Your XEN ICT Team wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>> I've looked at installed.packages() and it seems to me that quartz() is 
>>> "bundled" with the "main software" more than installed with a given 
>>> package.
>> 
>> It is part of package grDevices in 2.7.0 alpha.
>
> Thanks. It must be also true for 2.6.2.

My understanding is that in 2.6.2 it is part of the R.app GUI.  (There is 
a legacy device in package grDevices.)

>>> Is it possible to pass height and width in pixels more than in inches 
>>> working with 2.7.0 alfa?
>> 
>> Yes, since the dpi can be set.  I'm not sure why you would want to do that, 
>> mind you.
>
> To control appearance of graphics produced for the web.

In that case you don't want a screen device.  There are new versions of 
png() and jpeg() as well as new bmp() and tiff() devices, and they all 
work in pixels and have options to use Quartz (although that is not 
necessarily preferable to the cairo options, depending on how the latter 
work out by release time).

> We are trying to introduce R in our workflow. It is easy to figure out why. 
> Currently, Excel, SPSS and several software flavors producing graphics and 
> tables are involved. A kind of mess that nevertheless works. But I am sure R 
> can substitute each and all  of these tools and to add a great deal of 
> advantages. We keep discussions about papers we prepare in a wiki system. To 
> produce neat graphics from R to be display in wiki pages is a must for me 
> now.
>
>> As I read in http://developer.R-project.org/, R-alpha*.tar.gz packages are 
>> made automatically available, but I guess there is not *.dmg for these 
>> stages.
>> 
>> There are, thanks to Simon Urbanek at http://r.research.att.com/.  (The 
>> main CRAN Mac OS X page says so.)  (You want the R-2-7-branch version: the 
>> 'tiger' dmg should run on Leopard according to the notes.)
>> 
>> (I've never tested these, as building from the sources is easy enough.)
>
> To build my own binaries of several FOSS projects I working with is high in 
> my ToDo list! But I will take profit of Simon's work to re-start with R now. 
> Thanks to Simon.

There are a lot of new features in pre-2.7.0, and with it going into beta 
in a bit over a day now is a good time for MacOS users to start trying it 
out.


> Thanks for your help,
>
> Ricardo
>
> -- 
> Ricardo Rodríguez
> Your XEN ICT Team
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595