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win.metafiles in linux and R

Pikounis, Bill 
Dear all:

Professor Ripley commented:
Actually I have had some luck combining libEMF and pstoedit *on Linux* as
well; i.e., generate a postscript file thru R on Linux, and them apply
pstoedit to convert it to EMF (on Linux).  It is not perfect though, to be
sure; for instance I had to apply a rotation argument so that when I
transferred the resultant EMF file to Windows and then imported it into Word
it would be right-side up. Plus, I only tried some basic examples, like
plot(1:10) and a couple of snippets from example(xyplot). 

So yes, in theory a win.metafile() function is possible in R under Linux.
But as has been pointed out, (1) There are many more important things for
the R-core developers to concentrate on, and (2) all contributions are
welcome.  

Note for example, that at the libEMF site
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/libemf), the libEMF author has not done
anything with it for nearly 2 years, not even to incorporate 2 (gcc 3
related) patches that (see Bugs, and Patches) even I as a complete novice in
C could apply to get libEMF working with pstoedit
(http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit) under Linux Mandrake 9.1. 

The on-hold status of libEMF suggests to me that there has been no clamor
for the libEMF author to incorporate these simple patches, nor update the
library for widespread use.  

Thanks,
Bill

----------------------------------------
Bill Pikounis, Ph.D.

Biometrics Research Department
Merck Research Laboratories
PO Box 2000, MailDrop RY33-300  
126 E. Lincoln Avenue
Rahway, New Jersey 07065-0900
USA

Phone: 732 594 3913
Fax: 732 594 1565