R-devel has new versions of the X11(), png() and jpeg() devices on Unix-alikes. The intention is that these are used identically to the previous versions (which remain available) but will produce higher-quality output with more features.
Pros: Antialiasing of text and lines (can be turned off) but no blurring of fills. Buffering of the X11 display and fast repainting from a backing image. (The intention is to emulate the timer-based buffering of the windows() device in due course, but not for 2.7.0.) Ability to use translucent colours, including backgrounds, and produce partially transparent PNG files. Scalable text, including to sizes like 4.5 pt. This allows more accurate sizing on non-standard screen sizes (e.g. my home machine has a 90dpi 1650x1024 display whereas standard X11 fonts are set up for 75 or 100 dpi). Full support for UTF-8, so on systems with suitable fonts you can plot in many languages on a single figure (and this will work even in non-UTF-8 locales). The output should be locale-independent (unlike the current devices where even English text is rendered slightly differently in Latin-1 and UTF-8 locales). A utility function savePlot() to make a PNG/JPEG/TIFF copy of the current plot. The new png() and jpeg() devices do not require an X server to be running. Cons: Needs more software installed - cairo, pango and support packages (which on all the systems we have looked at are pulled in by the packages checked for). You will see something like Additional capabilities: PNG, JPEG, iconv, MBCS, NLS, cairo ^^^^^ if configure finds the software we are looking for. Slower under some circumstances (although on the test systems much faster than packages Cairo and cairoDevice). This will be particularly true for X11() with a slow connection between the machine running R and the X server. The additional software might not work correctly. The new versions are not currently the default, but can be made so by setting X11.options(type="Cairo"), e.g. as a load hook for package grDevices. I am using setHook(packageEvent("grDevices", "onLoad"), function(...) { grDevices::ps.options(horizontal=FALSE) if(getRversion() >= '2.7.0') grDevices::X11.options(type="Cairo") }) Please try these out and let us know how you get on. As a check, try the TestChars() examples in ?points - on one Solaris 10 system a few of the symbol font characters were incorrect. It worked on an FC5 system with auk% pkg-config --modversion pango 1.12.4 auk% pkg-config --modversion cairo 1.0.4 so the versions required are not all recent. Although these devices would in principle work on Mac OS X, neither cairo nor pango is readily available. We are working on other versions for Mac OS (X11 based on cairo/freetype, png/jpeg based on Quartz). There are also new svg() and tiff() devices. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel