>>>>> "CM" == Charlotte Maia <mai...@gmail.com> >>>>> on Tue, 1 Dec 2009 17:48:33 +1300 writes:
CM> Hi, CM> I consider raster graphics highly problematic in statistics. CM> People get caught up in the idea of creating pretty pictures, rather CM> than effectively visualising information. CM> Plus a lot of people (who should know better) needlessly put raster CM> images inside reports and articles (even books), which either makes CM> the files large (and very difficult to view), or creates blurry CM> images, or both. CM> It's always good to have more functionality. Yes indeed, and Paul has to be thanked loudly and heartfully and very much for providing it in the realm of graphics !!! CM> However, I certainly hope that most of the R community stick to vector CM> graphics (with conservative colour use), unless it is absolutely CM> necessary to do otherwise I agree with your reasoning *pro* using vector graphics as much as possible, and warning against the overuse of raster graphics in scientific work ! CM> necessary to do otherwise (and the only example I can think of, is CM> modelling images themselves). Did you look at the interesting page Paul sent the URL for, http://developer.r-project.org/Raster/raster-RFC.html ? Yes, modelling images is probably *the* most important application area, but *fast* direct plotting of a large matrix, mapping one matrix entry A_{i,j} to one pixel is also quite attractive, and the Matrix package authors (me being one) are quite interested to eventually see a version of lattice::levelplot() that builds on Paul's new grid::grid.raster() or grid::rasterGrob() functions. CM> On a side issue, I have found that R plots tend to be getting slower CM> over the years. CM> I think cairo was a bad move, however that's just my opinion... Dear me... using Cairo features for X11 graphics is just the new default, so users notice the nice new possibilities ! If you want the very fast (but not so very nice looking) previous default X11() graphics, please do read the help pages: --> ?X11 --> ?X11.options and then either X11.options(type = "Xlib") or X11( type = "Xlib") will give you the very fast (non-aliased, no alpha blending) X11 graphics that used to be the only one in R originally. Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich CM> regards CM> -- CM> Charlotte Maia CM> http://sites.google.com/site/maiagx/home ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel