Make plots with GNUplot. Have anyone tried that?
On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Martin Maechler wrote:
"LH" == Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman at gmail.com>
on Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:54:56 +0100 writes:
>> If you still want to then read ?write.table, that can export your data >> into a spreadsheet-like ascii format which can be used from GNUplot >> easily.
LH> Very interesting. LH> So if I e.g. write: LH> ts.sim <- arima.sim(list(order = c(1,1,0), ar = 0.7), n = 200) LH> ts.plot(ts.sim) LH> How do I know the names of the rows to put in the data.frame() command?
>> Btw, comparing the graphics capabilities of GNUplot and R, it is >> something like a three-wheel bicycle and a spaceship. Guess >> which is which.
LH> =) I know that I will most likely spend a lot of time on just making LH> the plots, but I atleast (for now =) ) think it could be fun to try. if you make them with R, yes. I wholeheartedly support Gabor's point: I'd consider GNUplot to be clearly inferior to R -- just talking about the graphics possibilties and the quality / thoughtfulness in the high-level plotting. If you have your data / objects / functions in R, I'm very strongly convinced that using GNUplot for plotting is ``the wrong'' approach by almost all definitions of "wrong".
In a later message Louise mentioned the desire to use TeX fonts for annotation, to match a LaTeX document. Paul Murrell has pointed out his and my article in R-News 2006-2 about how to do this. Louise almost mentioned the 'the gnuplot cvs which have pdfcairo support'. Well, R too has development versions, and I was able to do
par(family="cmr10") plot(1:10)
in R-devel and get annotations in Computer Modern on screen, or
cairo_pdf() par(family="cmr10") plot(1:10)
and get this on a PDF file. To do so you would need /usr/share/fonts/mathml/cmr10.ttf installed, at least on F8 (part of the mathml-fonts RPM).
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