Paul Murrell wrote:
Hi
Tobias Verbeke wrote:
Dear Tadashi,
Thank you very much for sharing your work.
I am sending a patch for R-2.7.0 for extending pdf device to embed pop
up text and
web links. The patch is available at
http://www.okada.jp.org/RWiki/?plugin=attach&pcmd=open&file=R-2.7.0.patch&refer=pdf%20device%20patch
You can see what the patch can do through a sample output, which is available at
http://www.okada.jp.org/RWiki/?plugin=attach&pcmd=open&file=sample2.pdf&refer=pdf%20device%20patch
An script is at
http://www.okada.jp.org/RWiki/?plugin=attach&pcmd=open&file=sample2.r&refer=pdf%20device%20patch
Ei-ji Nakama kindly build Windows binary, which can be obtained from
http://prs.ism.ac.jp/~nakama/tadakadosan/cran/
An installer, R-2.7.0pat-win32.exe, will install programs in
C:\Program Files\R\R-2.7.0pat
so that you can use both of original and patched version simultaneously.
I think it would be most useful if you could bundle your patched version
of the pdf device in a separate device package, similar to the
RSVGTipsDevice.
I would second that approach, at least in the meantime. This sort of
functionality is interesting and useful, but needs careful thought to
make it compatible with the existing graphics facilities in R.
One major consideration is that the graphics system tries to be mostly
device-independent, so that R graphics code can be run on any device.
This would need adjustments to the common graphics engine/device C code
rather than just to the C code underlying the PDF device.
Yes, more thought about how to integrate standard R graphics with extras
like popups could be very useful.
I wrote RSVGTipsDevice to be compatible with R graphics, in the sense
that code that generated a plot on RSVGTipsDevice could generate a plot
on any device (the information specific to RSVGTipsDevice would just be
discarded when plotting on other devices.)
I'd love to see more discussion of this, especially if it could lead to
a more general solution that could be used across multiple formats like
SVG, PDF, etc, so here's a recap of the issues and approach in
RSVGTipsDevice.
The features I wanted in RSVGTipsDevice were:
-- a popup "tooltip" on a graphics shape (a title + one or two lines of
text)
-- a clickable hyperlink on a graphics shape
A difference to the PDF device enhancements being discussed here is that
RSVGTipsDevice did not support adding any annotations to text.
The challenge in implementing this was that the R graphics commands for
shapes, like points(), rect(), polygon() etc did not provide any way of
accepting additional arguments (like tooltiptext= or url=) and passing
them down to the device-specific graphics functions (written in C).
The approach I took was to provide extra R functions that could be used
like this:
setSVGShapeToolTip(title="A triangle", desc1="green", desc2="big")
setSVGShapeURL("http://www.r-project.org";)
These would set up info for the next graphics shape drawn, saving the
info in the C level graphics structure for the next call to a shape
drawing function. If the next call to points() (or rect(), etc) drew
multiple shapes, only the first shape would get a tooltip or a
hyperlink. This is a definite limitation -- but I couldn't see a good
way to provide info for multiple shapes (other than by allowing
vectorized arguments to setSVGShapeToolTip, which seemed sort of
clunky). I was hoping for some more discussion about a better way to
implement this sort of thing in general. These function calls were made
"compatible" with any R graphics device by having them check if the
current device was RSVGTipsDevice -- if it wasn't they would simply
discard the info. This means that for code using these function calls
to run successfully when drawing on other devices, the RSVGTipsDevice
package must be loaded.
All this was done in a standard R package, so that as Paul says, people
could try it out without having to recompile R.
These attempts with RSVGTipsDevice (which were features added to the
RSvgDevice package written by T Jake Luciani) were just a first attempt
and I'd welcome any discussion or suggestions on how they could be
better implemented and integrated with R graphics, or integrated with
similar functionality for other devices.
-- Tony Plate
There is also the issue of following standard R coding style and
semantics. Rather than your approach of ...
text(5, 2, "text test")
pdf.link.on.text("http://www.google.com";)
... where the second call relies on a global setting to relate to the
appropriate text, it would be better to have something like ...
linkedText(5, 2, "text test", href="http://www.google.com";)
... so that the association is explicit.
By developing your ideas as an add-on package, people can try out your
ideas without having to recompile R. As Tobias has pointed out, the
RSVGTipsDevice package might be a good place to start.
Paul
What do you think ?
Kind regards,
Tobias
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
