Thanks for your comment. I would typically follow this approach too,
but I'm wondering whether one could find a more sophisticated
solution. Ideally, I'd like to be able to select the text that is
annotating the figure. There are very few cases where I can see a real
need for raster text, therefore I like to avoid resorting to it.
Using the versatile grid system, I can envisage two ways to implement
this,
i) generate a bitmap of the graph without any annotation (removing a
custom list of grob), and include the resulting image in a pdf file
containing only the annotations on top. I think grid could manage
perfectly accurate positioning between the image and its annotations.
ii) generate a sub-sampled version of the image part of the graph
before creating the pdf file (I'm thinking of the adimpro package, for
instance). However, I don't think this approach would work for a graph
that contains very many lines or other high-level grobs.
I'm probably missing some important points to consider as I have no
familiarity with the internals of R graphics engine / devices.
baptiste
On 20 Nov 2008, at 11:41, Stefan Evert wrote:
With N=1000, this approach produces a hefty pdf file of ~29MB, while
the png file with default resolution is only 72kB. It is clear that
I don't want to include the pdf figure in a manuscript, as most pdf
readers (let alone the printer) will painfully stall when scrolling
down the document. The png file has a good enough resolution (this
could be tuned anyway) as far as the levelplot is concerned, however
the text and labels are evidently converted to bitmap. I would like
to ask whether there are some alternative ways to combine the "best
of both worlds" in R, that is to create a pdf file with part of the
output being an embedded bitmap (the levelplot in this case). Xfig,
as I recall, has a way to produce two separate files for this kind
of purpose: one containing the graphical information stripped of
annotations, the other the labels and axes to be processed by TeX.
What I usually do in this situation is to produce very high-resolution
bitmaps (2000 x 2000 pixels and possibly even more). The .png files
for these will still be much smaller than your 30MB .pdf, and if you
don't need best quality, you can probably also convert them to .jpg
format. Most viewers should be able to display large bitmap images
fast and in good quality. This seems to be the only way to include
plots reliably in Microsoft Word documents ...
I'm not sure about the anti-aliasing options of R's png() driver, but
you could always generate an even higher-resolution bitmap and then
scale down with standard image processing software (ImageMagick, GIMP,
xv, ...).
My favourite solution is to generate a .pdf or .eps file, even if this
is very large, and then convert to a hi-res bitmap image with
"pstoimg" from the latex2html package. Useful command-line options
are:
pstoimg -type png -depth 24 -antialias -scale 2 plot.eps
Use the -scale option to generate the desired bitmap size.
Best regards,
Stefan Evert
[ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://purl.org/stefan.evert ]
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_____________________________
Baptiste Auguié
School of Physics
University of Exeter
Stocker Road,
Exeter, Devon,
EX4 4QL, UK
Phone: +44 1392 264187
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/research/emag
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