Scripting R

Hi,
is there something similar to rcom on OSX? I understand that R for  
OSX has some limited applescript support, but I was wondering if  
there is an easy way to share data with other applications. My  
ultimate goal would be to use R together with a spreadsheet as I can  
currently do on windows with R, rcom and Excel.

-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-mac-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-sig-mac-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
Simon Urbanek
Sent: 29 January, 2009 16:29
To: Yan Wong
Cc: r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] Possible mac-specific bug in svg
(cairo) graphics

Yan,

On Jan 28, 2009, at 6:33 , Yan Wong wrote:

On 27 Jan 2009, at 16:16, Simon Urbanek wrote:

I think you got the corresponding response to your post before -

Apologies: I didn't see that reponse.

cairographics cannot locate an italic version of the font -
switching to a font which has the desired traits will produce the
desired output, e.g.:

svg("test.svg", width=4,4,8)
par(family="Arial")
plot.new()
text(0.5,0.5,labels=expression(italic("This should be in

italics")))

dev.off()

Thanks. I tried this with family="Arial", family="Times",
family="serif", family="sans", family="Verdana", and

family="mono",

and they all come out as bold.

I guess if this doesn't happen on other systems, then is must be a
problem with my R or system setup. Unfortunately I don't have
another system  to try this out on.

Ah, sorry, my bad - I forgot that you're on 10.4 and I was testing
with 10.5. I do remember that 10.4 is missing italics from several
default fonts (e.g. Helvetica). You can enable fontconfig
debug using
FC_DEBUG=1 -- that will at least tell you what fontconfig found.

To make things worse, FreeType on Mac is quite buggy and screws up
numbering of fonts within a container which results in incorrect
styles - it is something we try to work around, but if FT recognizes
the wrong style we can't do anything about it. From what I can see
this is what happens -- the main difference between 10.4 and 10.5 is
that Arial and friends are supplied as (rf-style) font suitcases in
10.4 which is what FT has trouble dealing with. In 10.5 they come as
individual fonts which FT can deal with just fine.

I know that this is catching straws, but of one the few fonts that
come as TTF in 10.4 is "Euphemia UCAS", so this will produce italic
output even on 10.4:

svg("test.svg", width=4,4,8)
par(family="Euphemia UCAS")
plot.new()
text(0.5,0.5,labels=expression(italic("This should be in italics")))
dev.off()

Although this is a nuisance, working around bugs in 3rd party
libraries on older systems is not high on my priority list, os I
cannot promise anything, but maybe I'll get to it...

The italic versions of Arial, Time, and Verdana are all available,
according to Font Book.

All styles are in a single file and FT picks the wrong one,
unfortunately.

Have you any suggestions as to how I could try and find out

what is

going on here? Can I activate some sort of debugging or

verbose mode

in Cairographics?

FC_DEBUG=1 may help, but FT/cairographics don't have any
debugging env
vars AFAIR.

Cheers,
Simon

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