pictex graphics device and color

Is the pictex graphics device known not to support color?

Yes, amongst other settings like lwd and metric info for character output.

If you read the code you will see that the arguments fg and bg are
ignored.  In any case, there is no obligation for a graphics device to
support transparency, and in particular pictex() predates its introduction
into R.

As far as I am aware, pictex is a plain TeX package (that also
more-or-less works in LaTeX: it is barely mentioned in the LaTeX Companion
referred to on the help page, nor covered in any detail in the LaTeX
Graphics Companion), and plain TeX per se does not support colour.

In R 2.0.1 Patched (2004-11-17), it produced very pretty output:

## pictex(file = "modern-metatheonomy.tex", bg = "transparent");
## plotData(data);
## dev.off()

... but it appears to have ignored all color information.

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