[R-SIG-Mac] "special" paper option of postscript device not working

[Marc Schwartz]

On Sep 22, 2014, at 12:15 PM, Denis Chabot <chabot.denis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The journal where I want to submit does not accept PDF figures, only
> postscript (or bitmaps, which I want to avoid).
> 
> I want to control paper size by combining paper = "special" and "width" and
> "height" parameters to the postscript command, but the resulting page is
> always 8 x 11, at least as viewed with Preview and Illustrator.
> 
> This is with this code:
>    postscript(file="test.ps", width=5.5, height=4.25, horizontal=T, paper
> = "special")
>    par(mar=c(2.8, 2.8, 1.8, 0.2)+0.1, xpd=F, mgp=c(1.5,0.5,0), cex.lab=1)
> 
>    plot(1:10)
>    dev.off()
> 
> The plot occupies 1/4 of the 11x8.5 inch page.
> 
> I can live with this, but my reading of the postscript device documentation
> is that width and height control the size of the paper if I also use the
> page = "special" option. Because this could be the result of working on a
> Mac, I write here first, but will ask on the general R Help list if this
> has nothing to do with the Mac.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Denis


Denis,

In general and as noted in the Details section of ?postscript, you will want to create an EPS file, using the following incantation:

  postscript(file = ..., width = ..., height = ..., horizontal = FALSE, 
             paper = "special", onefile = FALSE)

Thus:

postscript(file = "test.eps", width = 5.5, height = 4.25, 
           horizontal = FALSE, paper = "special", onefile = FALSE)
par(mar=c(2.8, 2.8, 1.8, 0.2)+0.1, xpd=F, mgp=c(1.5,0.5,0), cex.lab=1)
plot(1:10)
dev.off()


On my Mac, with OS X 10.9.5, the attached file is generated in the fashion that you would expect.

There is also the ?setEPS function.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

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