Defaults for postscript()
On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Paul Murrell wrote:
Hi Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
The defaults for postscript() paper = "default" onefile = TRUE horizontal = TRUE (it seems) date from the days when people used to used this to send plots directly to a postscript printer via print.it=TRUE. I haven't done that for years, and it seems that our current generation of students don't even know the concept. It seems 'horizontal = TRUE' is particularly difficult to grasp. Given that I suspect almost all uses of postscript() are to produce plots to be viewed on-screen or incorporated into another document, a more appropriate set of defaults would be width = 7, height = 7
Wouldn't that be better as width = 6, height = 6 to match pdf() ?
Perhaps (but not matching X11 nor windows). Would anyone notice the difference? One argument against is that I now think the default pointsize in pdf() is too large for the default device region. I would have suggested 8x6 (which is what the MASS scripts use) apart from the R preference for square device regions. Thanks to Deepayan & Marc for other comments: I will have some follow-up comments in due course.
Paul
paper = "special" onefile = FALSE horizontal = FALSE which would have the advantage of using the same default aspect ratio for plots as all (?) other R graphics devices. Does anyone see a reason not to change the defaults?
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk 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