[6316] in s-news-athena
Interactive preparation of presentation graphics from S
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Douglas Bates)
Mon Jan 30 16:29:25 1995
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 95 14:55:55 -0600
From: bates@stat.wisc.edu (Douglas Bates)
To: charles@Playfair.Stanford.EDU
Cc: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
In-Reply-To: <199501272343.AA21456@tukey> (charles@Playfair.Stanford.EDU)
>>>>> Charles Roosen <charles@Playfair.Stanford.EDU> writes:
> For example, what I'd like in S is full object oriented graphics
> which can be modified dynamically. For instance, I'd like to be
> able to click on axis labels and change the font, size, and
> orientation. (I've spent far more time fiddling with oma and cex
> and las than I care too, and at points have found the easiest way to
> get what I wanted to be to edit the raw postscript file!!)
I too have spend my share of time manipulating graphical options using
par. There are a few techniques I have adopted such as storing each
plot as a "source file" of S language; using S-mode for emacs to edit
the file and submit the modified buffer to the S process; and using
ghostview or other PostScript previewers to examine the plot without
wasting paper. All of these techniques simply make it more convenient
to do "batch graphics programming" in S - they do not make S an
interactive graphical editor. I suspect that doing so would be a
formidable design and programming task.
A few years ago I suggested that it may be possible to add the power
of interactive graphical editing to S graphics cheaply by writing an S
device driver for a program like "idraw". Because I am not too
familiar with the format in which idraw graphics are saved, I cannot
say how difficult this would be. I hope it would not be unreasonably
difficult. Generally it has been easier to create graphics device
drivers for S than for other scientific graphics systems. For
example, S had PostScript output capabilities years (decades?) before
other statistical or scientific graphics systems.
With enough study of the format in which graphical objects for idraw
are stored, it may be straightforward to use S to plot the points,
lines, axes, etc. then import the stored graphical object into idraw
where the whiz-bang text, legends, copyright statements, etc. can be
added added and positioned interactively.
idraw is part of the InterViews package available from
ftp://interviews.stanford.edu:
