With N=1000, this approach produces a hefty pdf file of ~29MB, while
the png file with default resolution is only 72kB. It is clear that
I don't want to include the pdf figure in a manuscript, as most pdf
readers (let alone the printer) will painfully stall when scrolling
down the document. The png file has a good enough resolution (this
could be tuned anyway) as far as the levelplot is concerned, however
the text and labels are evidently converted to bitmap. I would like
to ask whether there are some alternative ways to combine the "best
of both worlds" in R, that is to create a pdf file with part of the
output being an embedded bitmap (the levelplot in this case). Xfig,
as I recall, has a way to produce two separate files for this kind
of purpose: one containing the graphical information stripped of
annotations, the other the labels and axes to be processed by TeX.
What I usually do in this situation is to produce very high-resolution
bitmaps (2000 x 2000 pixels and possibly even more). The .png files
for these will still be much smaller than your 30MB .pdf, and if you
don't need best quality, you can probably also convert them to .jpg
format. Most viewers should be able to display large bitmap images
fast and in good quality. This seems to be the only way to include
plots reliably in Microsoft Word documents ...
I'm not sure about the anti-aliasing options of R's png() driver, but
you could always generate an even higher-resolution bitmap and then
scale down with standard image processing software (ImageMagick, GIMP,
xv, ...).
My favourite solution is to generate a .pdf or .eps file, even if this
is very large, and then convert to a hi-res bitmap image with
"pstoimg" from the latex2html package. Useful command-line options are:
pstoimg -type png -depth 24 -antialias -scale 2 plot.eps
Use the -scale option to generate the desired bitmap size.
Best regards,
Stefan Evert
[ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://purl.org/stefan.evert ]
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