This may not be considered a bug but it is an incompatibility with S. There was a convention in S that the graphics parameter setting lwd = 0 is supposed to use the minimum possible line width on the device. It is not clear what that means on modern graphics devices but there is still code (like mine) that assumes something sensible happens with lwd = 0 It seems that R's postscript device driver does something reasonable with that for some graphics functions but not others. The abline function seems ok but the segments function doesn't. The following produces a PostScript output file "foo.ps" that causes ghostscript to complain of an error. R> postscript("foo.ps") R> plot(1:10, 1:10, type = "n") R> abline(h = 5, lty = 2, lwd = 0) # works properly R> segments(1, 1, 1, 3, lty = 2, lwd = 0) # fails R> dev.off() The last part of the PostScript file is 0.75 setlinewidth [ 3.00 3.00] 0 setdash np 77.04 290.39 m 743.76 290.39 l o 0.00 setlinewidth [ 0.00 0.00] 0 setdash np 101.73 107.87 m 101.73 199.13 l It is the line "[ 0.00 0.00] 0 setdash" that causes the problems. The error message from Ghostscript is Error: /rangecheckAladdin Ghostscript: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1 in --setdash-- Operand stack: --nostringval-- 0 Execution stack: %interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1 3 %oparray_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- 2 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- --nostringval-- Dictionary stack: --dict:874/941(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:75 I notice that in the C function PostScriptSetLineTexture in devPS.c, the step lengths seem to be multiplied by something that may be the line width before being written to the PostScript file. --please do not edit the information below-- Version: platform = i686-unknown-linux arch = i686 os = linux system = i686, linux status = status.rev = 0 major = 0 minor = 64.2 year = 1999 month = July day = 3 language = R Search Path: .GlobalEnv, Autoloads, package:base -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._