xfig XFig Graphics Device

Description

xfig starts the graphics device driver for producing XFig (version 3.2) graphics.

The auxiliary function ps.options can be used to set and view (if called without arguments) default values for the arguments to xfig and postscript.

Usage

xfig(file = if(onefile) "Rplots.fig" else "Rplot%03d.fig",
     onefile = FALSE, encoding = "none",
     paper = "default", horizontal = TRUE,
     width = 0, height = 0, family = "Helvetica",
     pointsize = 12, bg = "transparent", fg = "black",
     pagecentre = TRUE, defaultfont = FALSE, textspecial = FALSE)

Arguments

file	a character string giving the file path. For use with onefile = FALSE give a C integer format such as "Rplot%03d.fig" (the default in that case). (See postscript for further details.)
onefile	logical: if true allow multiple figures in one file. If false, assume only one page per file and generate a file number containing the page number.
encoding	The encoding in which to write text strings. The default is not to re-encode. This can be any encoding recognized by iconv: in a Western UTF-8 locale you probably want to select an 8-bit encoding such as latin1, and in an East Asian locale an EUC encoding. If re-encoding fails, the text strings will be written in the current encoding with a warning.
paper	the size of paper region. The choices are "A4", "Letter" and "Legal" (and these can be lowercase). A further choice is "default", which is the default. If this is selected, the papersize is taken from the option "papersize" if that is set to a non-empty value, otherwise "A4".
horizontal	the orientation of the printed image, a logical. Defaults to true, that is landscape orientation.
width, height	the width and height of the graphics region in inches. The default is to use the entire page less a 0.5 inch overall margin in each direction. (See postscript for further details.)
family	the font family to be used. This must be one of "AvantGarde", "Bookman", "Courier", "Helvetica" (the default), "Helvetica-Narrow", "NewCenturySchoolbook", "Palatino" or "Times". Any other value is replaced by "Helvetica", with a warning.
pointsize	the default point size to be used.
bg	the initial background color to be used.
fg	the initial foreground color to be used.
pagecentre	logical: should the device region be centred on the page?
defaultfont	logical: should the device use xfig's default font?
textspecial	logical: should the device set the textspecial flag for all text elements. This is useful when generating pstex from xfig figures.

Details

Although xfig can produce multiple plots in one file, the XFig format does not say how to separate or view them. So onefile = FALSE is the default.

The file argument is interpreted as a C integer format as used by sprintf, with integer argument the page number. The default gives files ‘Rplot001.fig’, ..., ‘Rplot999.fig’, ‘Rplot1000.fig’, ....

Line widths as controlled by par(lwd =) are in multiples of 5/6*1/72 inch. Multiples less than 1 are allowed. pch = "." with cex = 1 corresponds to a square of side 1/72 inch.

Windows users can make use of WinFIG (http://www.schmidt-web-berlin.de/WinFIG.htm, shareware), or XFig under Cygwin.

Conventions

This section describes the implementation of the conventions for graphics devices set out in the ‘R Internals’ manual.

• The default device size is the paper size with a 0.25 inch border on all sides.

• Font sizes are in big points.

• The default font family is Helvetica.

• Line widths are integers, multiples of 5/432 inch.

• Circle radii are multiples of 1/1200 inch.

• Colours are interpreted by the viewing/printing application.

Note

Only some line textures (0 <= lty < 4) are used. Eventually this may be partially remedied, but the XFig file format does not allow as general line textures as the R model. Unimplemented line textures are displayed as dash-double-dotted.

There is a limit of 512 colours (plus white and black) per file.

Author(s)

Brian Ripley. Support for defaultFont and textSpecial contributed by Sebastian Fischmeister.

See Also

Devices, postscript, ps.options.