I usually create a PDF with R, and import it into Powerpoint for
the mac. The results are fuzzy and not good. I don't have
Illustrator. For final presentations I sometimes send the pdf to
a colleague who has Illustrator, who converts it for me.
It's better to use PhotoShop (if you have it) than Illustrator - AI
doesn't handle objects with alpha component well and has some other
quirks. PS rendered all graphics I had perfectly and allows
flexible resolution settings and many more output formats.
Good to know. But I don't have PS either.
Other solution is to use R directly to produce hi-res bitmaps
instead of PDF. You'll need to tweak the settings to get a good
output, though.
This is probably the way to go, actually. Believe it or not, I had
not realized there was a way to make R produce bitmaps!
If, instead, the actual state of things is that R cannot produce
output that can be used well in the world's most popular
presentation software, then I think this should be a fairly
high-priority item. (Of course, I say this from the standpoint of
someone who will not actually be doing the work to implement a
change, so, easy for _me_ to say)!
The fact is that R can produce "output that can be used well in the
world's most popular presentation software" if you're using the
"world's most popular" operating system. That is the reason why it
becomes a very low priority item as your argument backfires ;).
By that argument, why bother with R for Mac at all?
Those of us who have colleagues on Windows with whom we need to
exchange Powerpoint slides are just in a bind, is all. But the
bitmap() solution should work fine for me, now that I know about it!
(I have not yet played with it to check).
Finally some good news ;). After some tweaking and bug-fixing I was
able to compile pstoedit and libEMF for OS X. The output isn't
exactly great, but people who can live with PowerPoint won't notice
or mind either, so there it goes:
http://www.rosuda.org/misc/pstoedit
That's the binary (statically linked, so nothing else needed). Just
download, run
chmod a+x pstoedit
on it in Terminal after downloading and you're ready to go. It's a
command-line tool, of course, and I highly recommend using the -pta
flag. Furthermore due to the limitations of EMF format, you may be
better off scaling the image to get somewhat more reasonable
result, so you could use something like:
pstoedit -pta -xscale 16 -yscale 16 test.pdf test.emf
The reason why scaling makes a difference is that EMF uses integer
precision and the grid of possible points is very coarse by default.
Terrific! Fantastic! From a quick test, this works well.
So to sum up: the bitmap() solution was always there, had I not been
too lazy to figure it out. And now Simon has made an installer for
pstoedit, which also works fine for me. Two good solutions to my
problem, one day after asking for them. That's what I call service!
I really appreciate this.
In conclusion I can't help but to say, get Keynote if you can
I have it and like it, but it's not a great solution for me: I
frequently have to exchange slides with colleagues who use
Powerpoint. For a while I prepared my own talks in Keynote and
exported to Powerpoint when I needed to, but there are some
drawbacks and hassles associated with that. More than half of my
colleagues have switched to Mac now, but it will be hard to force a
switch to Keynote as the de facto standard for everyone. I do hope
that in cases where I'm only dealing with my Mac-using colleagues,
we can make Keynote the lingua franca.
Thanks again, Simon, for your help.
--Phil Price