[R] new to the list - problems with non-solid lines in eps export

[Uwe Ligges]

Gregor Volberg wrote:
> Dear all,
> I am new to this list and, unfortunately, could not provide help to anyone as 
> yet. I hope I can do so in the future, though! Until then, I am grateful for 
> helpful hints from you more experienced users.
> 
> For use in an upcoming publication, I generated an eps figure from  my x11 
> window under Debian Linux with dev.copy2eps. It contains 28 line plots with 2 
> lines each, one solid and one dotted (they show event-related brain 
> potentials in two different conditions, if this is of interest for someone).  
> The plots are arranged in a window with width=5 inch and height = 6 inch, so 
> single plots are quite small. 
> Now the problem: When I include the file in Latex or other word processing 
> programs, the dotted line is almost unreadable. The whole waveform consists 
> of, say, 20 dots, which hardly form a curve. The same problem occurs under MS 
> Windows with dev.copy2eps(). However, when I directly plot the device under 
> Windows, the dotted lines are nice. Thus, the problem is presumably special 
> to eps "export". 
> I know that I could do an easy workaround by using thick/thin lines or 
> black/grey ones, but publication offices say that such lines are hard to 
> distinguish for the reader in the final print version. Also, I searched this 
> list for  something like "high resolution plots", but I learend that eps as a 
> vector format does not have a fixed resolution (and thus no option to make 
> ist "higher"). Plotting the figure to another device (png, bmp) reveals  the 
> expected curves, but bitmaps are often not accepted. 
> Does anyone have a hint, or does anyone have the same problem? Thank you in 
> advance for your help!


1. Use postscript() directly rather than the way through dev.copy2eps() 
(which should work as well, but let us exclude it for further reference).

2. Print the resulting postscript physically rather than looking at it 
on the screen. Omitting some points might be caused by some settings of 
your postscript viewer.

Uwe Ligges



> Gregor
> 
> 
> P.S.: The dotted lines are not fuzzy, but "stretched" in the way that the 
> point are to far away from each other to appear continuos. The same is with 
> other non-solid lines (dashed etc).
> 
> 
> 
>