Graphics Devices
Graphics in R are plotted on a graphics device. You can manually
specify a graphics device or let R use the default device. In an
interactive R environment, the default is to use the device that plots
graphics on the screen. On Microsoft Windows, the windows
device is used. On most Unix systems, the X11
device is used. On Mac OS X, the quartz
device is used. You can generate graphics in common formats using the bmp
, jpeg
, png
, and tiff
devices. Other devices include postscript
, pdf
, pictex
(to generate LaTeX/PicTeX), xfig
, and bitmap
.
Most devices allow you to specify the width, height, and point
size of the output (with the width
,
height
, and pointsize
arguments, of course). For devices
that generate files, you can usually use the argument name file
.[38] When you are done writing a graphic to a file, call the
dev.off
function to
close and save the file.
In writing this book, I used the png
function to
generate the graphics printed in this book. For example, I used the
following code to produce the first plot in Scatter Plots:
> png("scatter.1.pdf", width=4.3, height=4.3, units="in", res=72) > attach(toxins.and.cancer) > plot(total_toxic_chemicals/Surface_Area,deaths_total/Population) > dev.off()
[38] For postscript
, pdf
, pictex
, xfig
, and bitmap
, the name of the argument is
file
. For bmp
, jpeg
, png
, and tiff
, the name of the argument is
filename
. However, you can
safely use the argument name file
because of the way R’s argument matching rules work. In general, this ...
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