On 29/10/2014 14:10, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Grant Rettke <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Colin A. Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
First, it seems that under Yosemite, the default device is now x11 instead of
quartz.
Just curious, why do you prefer the quartz device over the x11 device on OSX?
Starting out with quartz, I got a lot of crashes with R from homebrew
(15 times in a row using base plotting) and when I switched to x11 the
crashes stopped.
Note that the quartz device uses Apple technology and expects the Apple
compilers to be used: 'homebrew' may not do so (we have seen crashes
from attempting to use other Objective-C compilers).
That's probably just your system or homebrew R. I have been using
quartz as a default device on various machines and OSX versions for
many years now, and never had a single crash.
As for the reason, the quartz device looks *much* nicer than the x11
device, probably because of the (better) anti-aliasing. Also, you do
not need to run an X server to use it.
I think it is more accurate to say that it looks much better than the
*default* X11 device on OS X. This is because the nicer device based on
cairographics (which is the default everywhere else) is not the default
for a standard build on OS X, and that is turn is because of historical
problems[*] with fonts in cairographics on OS X.
If you sidestep OS X and install a different implementation of
cairographics and different font handling libraries (and their fonts)
you can get better results.
[*] Many still seem to be present: for example font-handling is very
slow (especially when the device is first used), and font anti-aliasing
is poor compared to X11() on Linux even from 2007.
--
Brian D. Ripley, [email protected]
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK
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