[OT] bitmap rendering [Was: qqline plots outside plot area]

....it's quite embarrassing that people create such horrible output  

despite the fact that R has >much better graphics devices...

Simon, with great respect paid to your unbelievably hard and ongoing  
work, I think this notion that the users should just know better  
ways of using R is a big part of the problem here. R as currently  
figured is essentially the biggest scavenger hunt in the history of  
man tied to an essentially un-searchable application name.
How many packages in CRAN even have so much as a poorly documented  
vignette? In my experience, many of those few existing vignettes  
won't even work properly as coded, aren't actually explained in any  
event, and generally include at least one or two deprecated commands.

These better graphics devices may well exist, but the vast majority  
of R is largely undocumented beyond this sort of monkey-see, monkey- 
do (and you're lucky when/if you get that much; yes, I understand  
you can dig in and look at the underlying code...that's precisely  
not the point).
The end result is that most users never know about more than a  
fractional percent of available features; and those bits of  
knowledge they probably happened upon whilst trying to solve very  
specific problems that sent them wandering through sites such as the  
one linked. Thus, these solutions seem like manna from heaven and  
not at all something that's sub-par or of low relative quality.

No, I don't have any good solutions to offer, really, as most of  
these complaints land squarely on the doorsteps of the package  
maintaners (rather than yours). But it is frustrating that the  
conversations don't even seem to be happening; instead, users are  
criticized for struggling towards ad hoc solutions to problems they  
shouldn't be having anyway.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org 

wrote:

On Mar 18, 2009, at 8:44 , David Winsemius wrote:

And it now works fine for me as well. When I was running some of the  
graphics examples in the thread yesterday on recreating a JMP  
graphic, I noticed that the behavior had persisted in other plots,  
but that it later reverted to normal clipping behavior. Today  
rerunning that code does not reproduce the problem. I have revisited  
the webpage ;
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=127
... and repasted the code and the off-graph plotting does not return.


Oh my - the quality of the graphs on that website is horrible ...  
it's quite embarrassing that people create such horrible output  
despite the fact that R has much better graphics devices ...

Cheers,
Simon



-- 
David Winsemius

Someplace during the
On Mar 18, 2009, at 7:54 AM, Denis Chabot wrote:

Strange, it worked fine for me. At least it did after a fresh start of
R, with no additional package installed.

Denis
R version 2.8.1 Patched (2009-01-19 r47650)
i386-apple-darwin9.6.0

locale:
fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8/C/C/fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

Le 09-03-18 ? 07:00, r-sig-mac-request at stat.math.ethz.ch a ?crit :

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:38:20 -0400
From: David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
Subject: [R-SIG-Mac] qqline plots outside plot area
To: R-SIG-Mac Mailing List <r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Message-ID: <083A0C62-5967-4F02-9DBE-9812ED684AA8 at comcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

I just executed the example in the R graph gallery for qqplot and it
includes a call to qqline. It plots the line beyond the plotting
region, unlike the illustration and unlike the behavior of any of the
other "line" functions in my (limited) experience. the example on the
help page for qqplot/qqline does the same. It does not appear that I
have masked qqline with another package version.

y <- rt(200, df = 5)
qqnorm(y); qqline(y, col = 2)

-- 
David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT

sessionInfo()
R version 2.8.1 Patched (2009-01-19 r47650)
i386-apple-darwin9.6.0

locale:
en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] splines   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets
methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] caret_4.08      UsingR_0.1-12   codetools_0.2-1 lattice_0.17-20
Design_2.1-2    Hmisc_3.5-2     survival_2.34-1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] cluster_1.11.12 grid_2.8.1      tools_2.8.1


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