[R-SIG-Mac] Problems with savePlot() and postscript under Snow Leopard

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010, David Winsemius wrote:

>
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 5:04 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
>
>> 
>> On Feb 13, 2010, at 4:08 PM, Hannes Nietnagel wrote:
>> 
>>> Thanks David for your reply!
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> species.n <- as.numeric(iris$Species)
>>>> png("test.png")
>>>> plot(iris, col = species.n)
>>>> dev.off()
>>> 
>>> That works fine for the png. But I still get the message:
>>> postscript
>>>      3
>>> 
>>> What does it mean? Is there something wrong with my postscript?
>> 
>> I think it is telling you which graohics device is open for plotting.
>> 
>>> I still cannot produce a decent .eps file.
>>> 
>> 
>> From a fresh R session:
>> 
>>> ?quartz
>> starting httpd help server ... done
>>> ?postscript
>>> species.n <- as.numeric(iris$Species)
>>> png("test.png")
>>> plot(iris, col = species.n)
>>> dev.off()
>> null device
>>         1
>>> postscript("test.eps")
>>> plot(iris, col = species.n)
>>> dev.off()
>> null device
>>         1
>> 
>> I now have two files in my working directory (albeit with different aspect 
>> ratios). The test.eps file can be read by Preview although it needs to be 
>> converted to pdf to be displayed,  and then appears perfectly normal to me. 
>> The help page for postscript() says that single plots are eps by default, 
>> so I just named it to correspond to htat promise. If you post the console 
>> message and describe more fully what you mean by "cannot produce a decent 
>> .eps file", someone might be able to comment more fully.
>
> One the other hand, efforts to insert that file into an OpenOffice.org 
> presentation file results in an error: "Unknown graohic format". However, 
> adding 2 out of 3 of the recommended arguments does result in a file that can 
> be inserted. I'm not sure what is wrong either with the three argument effort 
> (see below) or just using the "file=" argument approach.
>
>> postscript(file="test.eps",horizontal = FALSE, onefile = FALSE)
>> plot(iris, col = species.n)
>> dev.off()
> null device
>         1
>
> When I try with all three arguments I get an error:
>
>> postscript(file="test.eps",horizontal = FALSE, onefile = FALSE, paper = 
>> "special")
>> plot(iris, col = species.n)
> Error in plot.new() : figure margins too large

You did not specify the size of the 'special' paper: use width=, 
height=.

If you just use file= you

1) may get a rotated plot (and will if the factory-fresh default for 
horizontal= is in place).
2) get a header that does not declare this is EPS, and some including 
applications will fail to include it (properly or at all).
3) get a plot with margins on the default paper size (A4 or US 
letter), which is not what one wants for inclusion.


-- 
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