Dear Lasse,
This won't answer your specific questions and I apologize for that.
AFAIK, pdf() produces uncompressed PDFs only. But you could use tools
like pdftk to compress your PDFs. About the PNGs, you can always set
the 'res' argument to improve resolution, but it won't beat the PDFs.
I'm not sure the reader (of your LaTeX document) would be interested
in seeing each of the 2M points of your scatter plot and, even if he
was, I doubt he could. So, instead of plot(x, y), have you considered
using:
smoothScatter(x, y)
?
Cheers,
b
On Oct 22, 2009, at 5:07 PM, Lasse Kliemann wrote:
I wish to save a scatter plot comprising approx. 2 million points
in order to include it in a LaTeX document.
Using 'pdf(...)' produces a file of size about 20 MB, which is
useless.
Using 'cairo_pdf(...)' produces a smaller file, around 3 MB. This
is still too large. Not only that the document will be too large,
but also PDF viewers choke on this. Moreover, Cairo has problems
with text: by default text looks ugly, like scaled bitmaps. After
hours of trying different settings, I discovered that choosing a
different font family can help, e.g.: 'par(family="Mono")'. This
gives good-looking text. Yet, the problem with the file size
remains.
There exists the hint to produdc EPS instead and then convert to
PDF using 'epstopdf'. The resulting PDF files are slightly
smaller, but still too large, and PDF viewers still don't like
it.
So I gave PNG a try. PNG files are much smaller and PDF viewers
have no trouble with them. However, fonts look ugly. The same
trick that worked for Cairo PDF has no effect for PNG. When I
view the PNGs with a dedicated viewer like 'qiv', even the fonts
look good. But not when included in LaTeX; I simply use
'\includegraphics{...}' and run the document through 'pdflatex'.
I tried both, creating PNG with 'png(...)' and converting from
PDF to PNG using 'convert' from ImageMagick.
So my questions are:
- Is there a way to produce sufficiently lean PDFs directly in R,
even when the plot comprises several million points?
- How to produce a PNG that still looks nice when included in a
LaTeX PDF document?
Any hints will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Lasse
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