Hi Folks, I see that people have been discussing the win.metafile device on the list since before 2000. Yet I have never seen this on a Linux distribution of R. Is this because the device works by making calls (GPL calls of course!) to a proprietary Windows library? In that case I can understand that it would be far from kosher to implement it on Linux. But I'd like confirmation. I must say that being able to produce Windows metafiles on Linux would help to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows: often one needs to produce a graphic which will be imported into a Windows application, but while PNG and the like are quite nice they don't have the merit of being a vector format, and don't scale well. Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 20-Oct-03 Time: 03:03:45 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> writes:> Hi Folks, > > I see that people have been discussing the win.metafile device > on the list since before 2000. > > Yet I have never seen this on a Linux distribution of R. > > Is this because the device works by making calls (GPL calls of > course!) to a proprietary Windows library? > > In that case I can understand that it would be far from kosher to > implement it on Linux. But I'd like confirmation. > > I must say that being able to produce Windows metafiles on Linux > would help to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows: often one > needs to produce a graphic which will be imported into a Windows > application, but while PNG and the like are quite nice they don't > have the merit of being a vector format, and don't scale well. >This has been discussed before; search the mailing list archives. There are libraries which sort-of work (used to be poorly, not sure what the exact status is now). No one has wanted to put in the time for finishing a sort-of working result up to now. Note that the same did hold true for PICT format on Macs. Not sure if it still does, though. best, -tony -- rossini at u.washington.edu http://www.analytics.washington.edu/ Biomedical and Health Informatics University of Washington Biostatistics, SCHARP/HVTN Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center UW (Tu/Th/F): 206-616-7630 FAX=206-543-3461 | Voicemail is unreliable FHCRC (M/W): 206-667-7025 FAX=206-667-4812 | use Email CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message and any attachme...{{dropped}}
On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:> Hi Folks, > > I see that people have been discussing the win.metafile device > on the list since before 2000. > > Yet I have never seen this on a Linux distribution of R. > > Is this because the device works by making calls (GPL calls of > course!) to a proprietary Windows library?More precisely, it makes calls to the underlying OS: metafiles are part of Windows.> In that case I can understand that it would be far from kosher to > implement it on Linux. But I'd like confirmation.It's more a question of having the means to do so. There have been projects to produce bitmap metafiles on Linux, but that's not what you want. Look in the archives for discussion, and the Windows TODO on developer.r-project.org says The ability to write WMF on Unix. (This means vector WMF, not the bitmaps that <tt>epstool</tt> and <tt>GSView</tt> make. One possible approach (suggested by Ben Bolker) would be to use <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libemf/"><tt>libEMF</tt></a>.) Also, current versions of S-PLUS (on Linux/Unix) have wmf.graph() which demonstrates that it should be feasible to do so.> I must say that being able to produce Windows metafiles on Linux > would help to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows: often one > needs to produce a graphic which will be imported into a Windows > application, but while PNG and the like are quite nice they don't > have the merit of being a vector format, and don't scale well.It's like reading/writing Excel files directly from R: it could be done but no one has wanted to do it enough to contribute code to do so. It's unclear if this would be a good use of scarce resources, as people who want to use Windows applications by definition have access to Windows and so could re-run scripts to generate plots using R under Windows (which is what I do when forced to supply .wmf figures). -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595