Prof Brian Ripley <ripley <at> stats.ox.ac.uk> writes: > > On Wed, 13 Apr 2011, Ben Bolker wrote: > > > Matthieu Stigler <matthieu.stigler <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > >> > >> Hi > >> > >> We are about to publish a book, which contains figures made with R > >> plots. An important detail that we did not take into account is that the > >> book will not be printed in 4 colors (cmyk mode), but only 2 (black > >> +"spotcolor"). The spotcolor we use is part of the big Pantone family. > >> > >> The problem is that both pdf() and postscript() offer either rgb or > >> cmyk, but no spotcolors such as pantone. > > Well, how could it? R's colour model is sRGB, and it has not other > way to refer to colours. The colour model is not at the level of a > package .... > > >> I'm afraid this constraint can't be solved at all, and we can't use > >> R for creating these plots? I did not find any package that would > >> extend the colormodel to include spot colors... Did anyone had a > >> similar experience? > > > > Wasn't aware of spotcolors, but I bet you could hack the PDF > > reasonably easily (if you have many figures you might have to > > use awk/sed/perl ?) ... if you don't use R, what is your alternative > > for creating the figures? > > No, PDF is not a text format and not easy to hack. It has a binary > index of byte positions so you edit it at your peril. > > However, this is exactly what professionals have PDF editing tools > for. I believe I used Acrobat (not Reader) to do it when I needed to > for my books.
OK. I was misremembering the good old days when I used to hack the PostScript coming out of gnuplot. I must admit that when I look at PDFs coming out of R, as in pdf("test.pdf") plot(1:10,1:10,pch=16,col=rep(1:5,2),cex=2) dev.off() I still see text-like bits like /sRGB cs 0.000 0.804 0.000 scn that are clearly (by experiment) hackable. That doesn't mean it's easy or a good idea in practice. Re Ted's comment that it's better to compute in R and draw figures outside: that really depends on one's comfort level with various tools and the tradeoffs between (1) command-line control and reproducibility (2) the ability to do subtle visual design adjustments by hand. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.