R EPS graphics and PDFs from Word Documents

-----Original Message-----

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 08:36:32 -0800
From: "Dr. Jose A. Garcia" <jgarcia35 at gmail.com>
Subject: [R-SIG-Mac] R EPS graphics and PDFs from Word Documents (Jose
	Garcia)
To: r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
Message-ID:
	<1afb42200611060836s5f7b3e47j5d3707afb5faa156 at mail.gmail.com>
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On Nov 3, 2006, at 7:32 PM, Dan Putler wrote:

Hi All,

This is likely to be viewed as being at the margins of acceptable

this list, but I've run into an issue that I can't find a way

Specifically, I'm working with a Windows based co-author, who is

MS Word based. So far I've found that we get the best graphic

using EPS graphic files created by R. The problem is that when I

use the standard way of getting a PDF of the Word document by

the file as a PDF in the main print dialog, the resulting PDF has

grayed warning box indicating that the graphic can't be seen on
screen. If I instead use the option to convert the PDF to

and then convert the resulting PostScript file back to PDF using
Preview, I get the graphics the way they should be. I can see them

screen, and so can anyone else. I can print them on one of my
PostScript printers, but when folks on Windows go to print these

to a PCL printer the output is a string of Ss. I then tried taking
the PS files and converting them to PDFs using ghostscript (ESP's

X port of gs 7.07 available from Gimp-Print). This causes all the
graphics to come through properly, but the text is gibberish. I

get what appears to be a clean conversion via CERN's document

(but in A4, which is a problem in Canada and the US).

Has anyone run into this problem and discovered the work-around

seems to be eluding me?

Dan

Microsoft Word does not handle EPS nor PDF graphics properly. If you
want to embed your graphic in a word document, the best option is to
save as jpeg from R. The quality of the figure is good enough.

However, if you are working for a publication, then most probably they
will be asking for a EPS. In that case, wrote your paper in Word and
do not try to insert the figures in the document. Send them as both
EPS and PDF individual files instead.

I do think that the best option for a paper is to use LaTeX. The best
figures in R are generated using postscript (EPS) which can be
inserted very well on LaTeX documents.

Cheers,

--
Jose A. Garcia, Ph.D.
Keck Graduate Institute
535 Watson Drive
Claremont, CA 91711
(909)-607-9254