| postscript {grDevices} | R Documentation |
postscript starts the graphics device driver for producing
PostScript graphics.
postscript(file = ifelse(onefile, "Rplots.ps", "Rplot%03d.ps"),
onefile = TRUE, family,
title = "R Graphics Output", fonts = NULL,
encoding, bg, fg,
width, height, horizontal, pointsize,
paper, pagecentre, print.it, command)
file |
a character string giving the name of the file. If it is
"", the output is piped to the command given by the argument
command.
For use with onefile = FALSE give a printf format such
as "Rplot%03d.ps" (the default in that case).
|
onefile |
logical: if true (the default) allow multiple figures
in one file. If false, generate a file name containing the page
number and use an EPSF header and no DocumentMedia comment. |
family |
the initial font family to be used, normally as a
character string. See the section ‘Families’. This defaults
to "Helvetica". |
title |
title string to embed in the file. |
fonts |
a character vector specifying additional R graphics font family names for font families whose declarations will be included in the PostScript file and are available for use with the device. See Details. |
encoding |
the name of an encoding file. Defaults to
‘"CP1250.enc"’ (East European), "CP1251.enc" (Cyrillic),
"CP1253.enc" (Greek) or "CP1257.enc" (Baltic) if one
of those codepages is in use, otherwise ‘"WinAnsi.enc"’
(codepage 1252),
in the ‘enc’ directory of package grDevices, which is used
if the path does not contain a path separator. An extension
".enc" can be omitted.
|
bg |
the default background color to be used.
If "transparent" (or an equivalent specification), no
background is painted. |
fg |
the default foreground color to be used. |
width, height |
the width and height of the graphics region in inches. The default is to use the entire page less a 0.25 inch border on each side. |
horizontal |
the orientation of the printed image, a logical. Defaults to true, that is landscape orientation on paper sizes with width less than height. |
pointsize |
the default point size to be used. Strictly speaking, in bp, that is 1/72 of an inch, but approximately in points. |
paper |
the size of paper in the printer. The choices are
"a4", "letter", "legal" and
"executive" (and these can be capitalized).
Also, "special" can be used, when the width
and height specify the paper size. A further choice is
"default", which is the default. If this is selected, the
papersize is taken from the option "papersize"
if that is set and to "a4" if it is unset or empty. |
pagecentre |
logical: should the device region be centred on the page? – defaults to true. |
print.it |
logical: should the file be printed when the device is
closed? (This only applies if file is a real file name.) |
command |
the command to be used for “printing”. Defaults to
option "printcmd"; this can also be selected as
"default". |
postscript opens the file file and the PostScript
commands needed to plot any graphics requested are written to that
file. This file can then be printed on a suitable device to obtain
hard copy.
A postscript plot can be printed via postscript in two ways.
print.it = TRUE causes the command given in
argument command to be called with argument "file"
when the device is closed. Note that the plot file is not deleted
unless command arranges to delete it.
file="" or file="|cmd" can be used to print
using a pipe on systems that support ‘popen’. Failure to open the
command will probably be reported to the terminal but not to
‘popen’, in which case close the device by dev.off
immediately.
Only the first of these will work on Windows, and the default
"printcmd" is empty and will give an error if
print.it=TRUE is used. Suitable commands to spool a PostScript
file to a printer can be found in ‘RedMon’ suite available from
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html. The command will be
run in a minimized window. GSView 4.x provides ‘gsprint.exe’
which may be even more convenient (it requires GhostScript version 6.0
or later).
The file argument is interpreted as a C integer format as used
by sprintf, with integer argument the page number.
The default gives files ‘Rplot001.ps’, ..., ‘Rplot999.ps’,
‘Rplot1000.ps’, ....
The postscript produced for a single R plot is EPS (Encapsulated
PostScript) compatible, and can be included into other documents,
e.g., into LaTeX, using \includegraphics{<filename>}. For use
in this way you will probably want to set horizontal = FALSE,
onefile = FALSE, paper = "special". Note that the bounding box is
for the device region: if you find the white space around the plot
region excessive, reduce the margins of the figure region via
par(mar=).
Most of the PostScript prologue used is taken from the R character
vector .ps.prolog. This is marked in the output, and can be
changed by changing that vector. (This is only advisable for
PostScript experts: the standard version is in
namespace:grDevices.)
A PostScript device has a default family, which can be set by the user
via family. If other font families are to be used when drawing
to the PostScript device, these must be declared when the device is
created via fonts; the font family names for this argument are
R graphics font family names (see the documentation for
postscriptFonts).
Line widths as controlled by par(lwd=) are in multiples of
1/96 inch: nultiples less than 1 are allowed. pch="." with
cex = 1 corresponds to a square of side 1/72 inch.
Font families are collections of fonts covering the five font faces,
(conventionally plain, bold, italic, bold-italic and symbol) selected
by the graphics parameter par(font=) or the grid
parameter gpar(fontface=). Font families can be
specified either as an an initial/default font family for the device
via the family argument or after the device is opened by
the graphics parameter par(family=) or the grid
parameter gpar(fontfamily=). Families which will be
used in addition to the initial family must be specified in the
fonts argument when the device is opened.
Font families are declared via a call to postscriptFonts.
The argument family specifies the initial/default font family
to be used. In normal use it is one of "AvantGarde",
"Bookman", "Courier", "Helvetica",
"Helvetica-Narrow", "NewCenturySchoolbook",
"Palatino" or "Times", and refers to the standard Adobe
PostScript fonts families of those names which are included (or
cloned) in all common PostScript devices.
Many PostScript emulators (including those based on
ghostscript) use the URW equivalents of these fonts, which are
"URWGothic", "URWBookman", "NimbusMon",
"NimbusSan", "NimbusSanCond", "CenturySch",
"URWPalladio" and "NimbusRom" respectively. If your
PostScript device is using URW fonts, you will obtain access to more
characters and more appropriate metrics by using these names. To make
these easier to remember, "URWHelvetica" == "NimbusSan" and
"URWTimes" == "NimbusRom" are also supported.
Another type of family makes use of CID-keyed fonts for East Asian
languages – see postscriptFonts.
The family argument is normally a character string naming a
font family, but family objects generated by Type1Font
and CIDFont are also accepted.
For compatibiility with earlier versions of R, the initial family can
also be specified as a vector of four or five afm files.
Encodings describe which glyphs are used to display the character codes
(in the range 0–255). Most commonly R uses ISOLatin1 encoding, and
the examples for text are in that encoding. However,
the encoding used on machines running R may well be different, and by
using the encoding argument the glyphs can be matched to
encoding in use. This suffices for European and Cyrillic languages,
but not for CJK languages. For the latter, composite CID fonts are
used. These fonts are useful for other languages: for example they
may contain Greek glyphs. (The rest of this section applies only when CID
fonts are not used.)
None of this will matter if only ASCII characters (codes 32–126) are
used as all the encodings (except "TeXtext") agree over that
range. Some encodings are supersets of ISOLatin1, too. However, if
accented and special characters do not come out as you expect, you may
need to change the encoding. Some other encodings are supplied with
R: "WinAnsi.enc" and "MacRoman.enc" correspond to the
encodings normally used on Windows and Classic MacOS (at least by
Adobe), and "PDFDoc.enc" is the first 256 characters of the
Unicode encoding, the standard for PDF. There are also encodings
"ISOLatin2.enc", "CP1250.enc", "ISOLatin7.enc"
(ISO 8859-13), "CP1257.enc", and "ISOLatin9.enc" (ISO
8859-15), "Cyrillic.enc" (ISO 8859-5), "KOI8-R.enc",
"KOI8-U.enc", "CP1251.enc", "Greek.enc" (ISO
8859-7) and "CP1253.enc". Note that many glyphs in these
encodings are not in the fonts corresponding to the standard families.
(The Adobe ones for all but Courier, Helvetica and Times cover little
more than Latin-1, whereas the URW ones also cover Latin-2, Latin-7,
Latin-9 and Cyrillic but no Greek. The Adobe exceptions cover the
Latin character sets, but not the Euro.)
If you specify the encoding, it is your responsibility to ensure that the PostScript font contains the glyphs used. One issue here is the Euro symbol which is in the WinAnsi and MacRoman encodings but may well not be in the PostScript fonts. (It is in the URW variants; it is not in the supplied Adobe Font Metric files.)
There is an exception. Character 45 ("-") is always set
as minus (its value in Adobe ISOLatin1) even though it is hyphen in
the other encodings. Hyphen is available as character 173 (octal
0255) in all the Latin encodings, Cyrillic and Greek. There are some
discrepancies in accounts of glyphs 39 and 96: the supplied encodings
(except CP1250 and CP1251) treat these as ‘quoteright’ and
‘quoteleft’ (rather than ‘quotesingle’/‘acute’
and ‘grave’ respectively), as they are in the Adobe
documentation.
TeX has traditionally made use of fonts such as Computer Modern which
are encoded rather differently, in a 7-bit encoding. This encoding
can be specified by encoding = "TeXtext.enc", taking care that
the ASCII characters < > \ _ { } are not available in those
fonts.
There are supplied families "ComputerModern" and
"ComputerModernItalic" which use this encoding, and which are
only supported for postscript (and not pdf). They are
intended to use with the Type 1 versions of the TeX CM fonts. It will
normally be possible to include such output in TeX or LaTeX provided
it is processed with dvips -Ppfb -j0 or the equivalent on your
system. (-j0 turns off font subsetting.) When family =
"ComputerModern" is used, the italic/bold-italic fonts used are
slanted fonts (cmsl10 and cmbxsl10). To use text italic
fonts instead, set family = "ComputerModernItalic".
These families use the TeX math italic and symbol fonts for a comprehensive but incomplete coverage of the glyphs covered by the Adobe symbol font in other families. This is achieved by special-casing the postscript code generated from the supplied ‘CM_symbol_10.afm’.
Support for Computer Modern fonts is based on a contribution by Brian D'Urso durso@hussle.harvard.edu.
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.
postscriptFonts,
Devices,
{check.options which is called from both
ps.options and postscript}.
## Not run:
# open the file "foo.ps" for graphics output
postscript("foo.ps")
# produce the desired graph(s)
dev.off() # turn off the postscript device
options(printcmd='redpr -P"\\markov\lw"')
postscript(file=tempfile("Rps."), print.it=TRUE)
# produce the desired graph(s)
dev.off() # send plot file to the printer
## alternative using GSView 4.x
options(printcmd='/GhostGum/gsview/gsprint -query')
# for URW PostScript devices
postscript("foo.ps", family = "NimbusSan")
## for inclusion in Computer Modern TeX documents, perhaps
postscript("cm_test.eps", width = 4.0, height = 3.0,
horizontal = FALSE, onefile = FALSE, paper = "special",
family = "ComputerModern", encoding = "TeXtext.enc")
## The resultant postscript file can be used by dvips -Ppfb -j0.
## To test out encodings, you can use
TestChars <- function(encoding="ISOLatin1", family="URWHelvetica")
{
postscript(encoding=encoding, family=family)
par(pty="s")
plot(c(-1,16), c(-1,16), type="n", xlab="", ylab="",
xaxs="i", yaxs="i")
title(paste("Centred chars in encoding", encoding))
grid(17, 17, lty=1)
for(i in c(32:255)) {
x <- i %% 16
y <- i %/% 16
points(x, y, pch=i)
}
dev.off()
}
## there will be many warnings. We use URW to get a complete enough
## set of font metrics.
TestChars()
TestChars("ISOLatin2")
TestChars("WinAnsi")
## End(Not run)