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clarity of fonts in graphics?

3 messages · Alex Buerkle, William Revelle

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Dear R-Mac developers.

I am now using R 2.0.0 and find it a very nice improvement over 
1.9.1.  Thank you for all of the work.

  However, I do have a problem with the clarity of the fonts in the 
Quartz window.  I am sure that I am missing something, but what?


My problem is best seen in the following code:

x=rnorm(1000)
quartz(height=6,width=9)      #make a window suitable for printing

par(mfrow=c(1,1))
hist(x,xlab="Horizontal label is clear", main="and Title is as well") 
#this one is fine


par(mfrow=c(2,2))
hist(x,xlab="Horizontal label is still clear", main="and Title is") 
#as is this one

par(mfrow=c(3,2))
hist(x,xlab="Horizontal label is no longer clear", main="but Title 
is") #but this one blurs the xlab

(obviously I am leaving out the other histograms in the 2,2 and 3,2 cases.)

This same code produced crystal clear graphics in 1.9.1

Bill
#
Bill,

I believe it has to do with the Font Smoothing of your display as 
configured in the Appearance section of System Preferences.  Fonts 
smaller than some set value are not smoothed for the display.

Try your R commands again after you change the value to Font Size 4.  
It made a difference on my display.

-Alex
On Oct 19, 2004, at 10:30 AM, William Revelle wrote:

            
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Alex and the R-Mac list

Thanks.  That was the problem.  Probably by making the quartz device 
so Mac compliant the font smoothing issue was raised.

And once again thanks to Stefano and Simon for such a good implementation.


Bill