[R-SIG-Mac] [OT] bitmap rendering [Was: qqline plots outside plot area]

Simon Urbanek simon.urbanek at r-project.org
Wed Mar 18 16:22:32 CET 2009 

Eric,

On Mar 18, 2009, at 10:38 , Eric Wooten wrote:

> >....it's quite embarrassing that people create such horrible output  
> despite the fact that R has >much better graphics devices...
>
> Simon, with great respect paid to your unbelievably hard and ongoing  
> work, I think this notion that the users should just know better  
> ways of using R is a big part of the problem here. R as currently  
> figured is essentially the biggest scavenger hunt in the history of  
> man tied to an essentially un-searchable application name.
> How many packages in CRAN even have so much as a poorly documented  
> vignette? In my experience, many of those few existing vignettes  
> won't even work properly as coded, aren't actually explained in any  
> event, and generally include at least one or two deprecated commands.
>
> These better graphics devices may well exist, but the vast majority  
> of R is largely undocumented beyond this sort of monkey-see, monkey- 
> do (and you're lucky when/if you get that much; yes, I understand  
> you can dig in and look at the underlying code...that's precisely  
> not the point).
> The end result is that most users never know about more than a  
> fractional percent of available features; and those bits of  
> knowledge they probably happened upon whilst trying to solve very  
> specific problems that sent them wandering through sites such as the  
> one linked. Thus, these solutions seem like manna from heaven and  
> not at all something that's sub-par or of low relative quality.
>
> No, I don't have any good solutions to offer, really, as most of  
> these complaints land squarely on the doorsteps of the package  
> maintaners (rather than yours). But it is frustrating that the  
> conversations don't even seem to be happening; instead, users are  
> criticized for struggling towards ad hoc solutions to problems they  
> shouldn't be having anyway.
>

To be honest I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I  
was not talking about any packages or hidden features at all. Almost  
all default graphics device (quartz on Mac OS X and X11 on all other  
unices) as well as bitmap graphics output (png, jpeg, ...) are now  
producing very nice output and Brian Ripley has spent quite some time  
recently making all devices as consistent as possible and adding cairo  
backend to be default in R to produce good output and support modern  
drawing features. In addition, there are better formats such as PDF to  
consider which also work very well. Hence I don't see why we should  
put up with font rendering reminiscent of the time of 8 color displays  
many decades ago.

In addition we are on SIG-Mac here, and you have to work really,  
really hard to get such horrible output on a Mac ;)

Cheers,
Simon


>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org 
> > wrote:
>
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 8:44 , David Winsemius wrote:
>
> And it now works fine for me as well. When I was running some of the  
> graphics examples in the thread yesterday on recreating a JMP  
> graphic, I noticed that the behavior had persisted in other plots,  
> but that it later reverted to normal clipping behavior. Today  
> rerunning that code does not reproduce the problem. I have revisited  
> the webpage ;
> http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=127
> ... and repasted the code and the off-graph plotting does not return.
>
>
> Oh my - the quality of the graphs on that website is horrible ...  
> it's quite embarrassing that people create such horrible output  
> despite the fact that R has much better graphics devices ...
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>
> -- 
> David Winsemius
>
> Someplace during the
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 7:54 AM, Denis Chabot wrote:
>
> Strange, it worked fine for me. At least it did after a fresh start of
> R, with no additional package installed.
>
> Denis
> R version 2.8.1 Patched (2009-01-19 r47650)
> i386-apple-darwin9.6.0
>
> locale:
> fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8/C/C/fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> Le 09-03-18 à 07:00, r-sig-mac-request at stat.math.ethz.ch a écrit :
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:38:20 -0400
> From: David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
> Subject: [R-SIG-Mac] qqline plots outside plot area
> To: R-SIG-Mac Mailing List <r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> Message-ID: <083A0C62-5967-4F02-9DBE-9812ED684AA8 at comcast.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> I just executed the example in the R graph gallery for qqplot and it
> includes a call to qqline. It plots the line beyond the plotting
> region, unlike the illustration and unlike the behavior of any of the
> other "line" functions in my (limited) experience. the example on the
> help page for qqplot/qqline does the same. It does not appear that I
> have masked qqline with another package version.
>
> y <- rt(200, df = 5)
> qqnorm(y); qqline(y, col = 2)
>
> -- 
> David Winsemius, MD
> Heritage Laboratories
> West Hartford, CT
>
> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.8.1 Patched (2009-01-19 r47650)
> i386-apple-darwin9.6.0
>
> locale:
> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] splines   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets
> methods   base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] caret_4.08      UsingR_0.1-12   codetools_0.2-1 lattice_0.17-20
> Design_2.1-2    Hmisc_3.5-2     survival_2.34-1
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] cluster_1.11.12 grid_2.8.1      tools_2.8.1
>
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
> David Winsemius, MD
> Heritage Laboratories
> West Hartford, CT
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>

More information about the R-SIG-Mac mailing list