[rkward-devel] Better looking graphs using cairo

[Stefan Rödiger]

Am Sonntag, 9. März 2008 22:44:45 schrieb Wouter Stomp:
> Hello,
>

Hi Wouter,

> I really like rkward,

glad to hear this. :)

> but the quality of the graphs it produces is not 
> as good as it could be. There is a R cairo package[1] available that
> produces high quality graphs. It supports alpha channels and
> anti-aliasing. It can output to the display, bitmap graphics and
> vector graphics. It would be nice if rkward used this to produce
> graphs, and also have an option to save graphs as svg vector files.

We are aware of this fact and some solutions were already discussed on the 
list. But so far we did not make any progress basically due to a lack of 
manpower.

Just in case you don't know. There are several options to export graphs as pdf 
or ps (eps compatible). This should give you high quality graphs at the end. 
To achieve this create a graph and chose the "preview" option -> chose in 
the "preview window" the menu "Device" than "Export ..." -> ... .
I recommend to use ps because these can be handled by many other tools 
(scribus and inkscape come to my mind here). 
Not an optimal solution and not really what you want but this is what we can 
offer out of the box for high quality graphs.

Another solution is to reuse the code output of RKWard in combination with any 
graphic package you desire.

> Would this be possible?
>

Basically yes, but I guess not anytime soon. But it is on top of the list.

> Cheers,
>
> Wouter
>
>

Thanks for your input.

>
> 1. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Cairo
>