R: Including R plots in a Microsoft Word document

I have wrestled with this problem a lot. I use Linux, coauthors use
Windows, and the eps files I make from R don't work with MS Word.  Well,
the don't ever have "previews" and they sometimes won't print at all
when I use CrossOver Office with MS Office 2000 in Linux.  My coauthor
says he can often wrestle my eps files into word on his system with
Office 2003.  People keep telling me to use gsview to insert the preview
panes into eps files, and that does work, but more than one half of the
time my system creates eps files that look significantly worse than the
originals.  Sometimes it inserts a blank page at the top of the eps or
it reshapes a figure.  I don't care enough about MS to try to track that
down.  It just pisses me off.


As a result, I think the answer is more complicated than other people
make it seem.

I don't think it does any good to output a pdf file because, as  I
learned yesterday, MS Word users can't import a pdf file into a doc.

Clearly, if you are an MS windows user of R, you can save graphics in
the windows meta format (wmf)  (or is it enhanced meta format, emf?).
That will go more or less seamlessly into Word.  If you have a chance to
boot into Windows, and you really must make an image that works well
with Word, then you should boot into Windows, run your R in there and
make the wmf file.

If you are a Linux/Unix user, and you are too proud to use Windows,  the
problem is much more difficult to deal with.

If you are ABSOLUTELY SURE that your image does not need to be resized
in any way, you could output from R into a picture type format, such as
png.  As long as the image does not need to resized in any way, that
will be fine.  If it is resized, then all bets are off.

I find that the R output to the xfig format is quite good and I can edit
files in xfig.  You can edit those files, add text, so its very very
handy.  So right now I'm looking for a good bridge from xfig format to
Word.  But I just started investigating that.

uaca at alumni.uv.es wrote:

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 05:54:33PM +0200, Mahmoud K. Okasha wrote:

Greetings List,

I am conducting some large simulations using R. As a result, I get many

R can produce at least PostScript, PDF, png, jpeg/jpg

see:

help(postscript)
help(pdf)
help(png)
help(jpeg)

I don't use word, for me the PostScript format (more precisely

PostScript/.eps) is the best/more easy/powerful format if you don't have

points or lines :-)

por instance, to print a simple plot:

postscript(file="somefile.eps");

plot(whatever);

dev.off(); <<---- Important

other formats are similar

regards

Ulisses


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