How can I redirect all plots including any intermediate state to a file synchronously?
I want to automatically redirect plots to a file without using expressions like png(); xxx; dev.off(). Imagine a in function where users can provide random plotting scripts and I don't know which line of code they start to plot and which line end and how many plots. As long as they make a plot, I want to capture it. One option is to use options(device="png"), found from this post.
options(device="png") method will create an empty file named like Rplot001.png and when dev.off or another top-level plotting function is called, write to the file. So no intermediate state is saved.
What I want is more like the plots panel in Rstudio: when I make some low-level changes, the image file is updated immediately.
A simple example, I want to plot a point and add a title.
options(device="png")
plot(1)
At this point, the plot should be captured by a file automatically, let's name it Rplot001.png.
title("abc")
Then, the Rplot001.png is updated which contains the title.
The problem is when I do this, Rplot001.png is not written unless I manually call dev.off or open another plot.
Related
I want to use a R script which is publicly available from Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Correlation_examples2.svg .
This program is supposed to output an image but for some reason when I paste the code to Rstudio it doesn't plot.
What can I do to make it output the image?
Two main reasons:
The script by itself doesn't plot anything. It just sets up the function that will generate the image. So pasting the code by itself won't help and you need to call the 'output' function.
However the function by itself doesn't plot anything either. It saves the plot as Rplots.svg which contains the .svg code to plot the images.
To display the plot in RStudio, use for example the magick package.
output()
magick::image_read_svg('Rplots.svg')
Alternatively you can open the Rplots.svg file with a browser of your choice.
When editing an R notebook inside RStudio, if I create multiple graphical outputs in one R block, I get an icon for each plot, which I can click on to select which plot to look at:
I like that behavior, it's especially handy to click from one plot to another to compare changes between them.
However, when I render the notebook to HTML (e.g. by hitting the "Preview" button in the editor), the plots simply cascade down the page:
Is there a way I can get the former behavior in an exported document? Some option I can set, or a chunk of Javascript I can include, or something?
I have been making plots for some time now, and they are precisely the way I like them, on screen. The data is coming in from sensors related to solar power collection and storage.
Plotted on screen they look great so I do a screen region capture to save them.
So now I would like to automate the saving process.
Here is what I have done so far:
I set up a cron job so they would be run right at midnight, capturing the whole day and saving it as a .png file
Then it moves the "today.dat" data file to the archive named by date.
This part is all working as designed.
EXCEPT, by using .PNG the images do not look the same.
I really thought png would be the best option, but it turns out that the font used for the X-axis (HH:MM ticks) is too thick and they run together. It looks like a crayon-drawn version of my plot designs.
Can someone please give me some guidance on how to best programatically generate the plots for saving so they look like the way I designed them?
As pointed out in the comments above, the best way is probably to use a different terminal for output to an image file, and simply ignore the fact that the generated images are not identical to what you see on your screen when using the x11 terminal. However, if you really need an exact copy, there are (at least) two options:
You could automate the process of taking a screenshot. You can even do this from within gnuplot, where it might come handy that the GPVAL_TERM_WINDOWID variable contains the X Windows ID for the current plot window. You can use that to make a screenshot of the window after you made the plot:
system(sprintf("xwd -id 0x%x | convert xwd:- screenshot.png", GPVAL_TERM_WINDOWID))
Here I included a call to convert to convert the xwd file format to png.
Another option is to use the xlib terminal, which saves the sequence of commands that the gnuplot_x11 helper application turns into the window you see on the screen. For example,
set term push; set term xlib; set output "file.xlib"; replot; set output; set term pop
will create the file file.xlib that has all the information of the last plot. To later view this plot, use
gnuplot_x11 -noevents -persist < file.xlib
where you might have to specify the path to gnuplot_x11.
Similar as #user8153 suggested for x11, you can use import, which is as convert an imagemagick tool
system("import -window ".GPVAL_TERM_WINDOWID." screenshot.png")
Convenient is also a shortcut to copy the image into clipboard and paste it with Ctrl+v elsewhere:
bind Ctrl-c 'system("import -window ".GPVAL_TERM_WINDOWID." png:- | xclip -sel clip -t image/png")'
See also Show graph on display and save it to file simultaneously in gnuplot.
I want to pass data from Spotfire to R and then display the plot constructed by R.
What is the best way to do this?
I’ve figured out the trick of putting images into Spotfire. It’s not hard if you follow these directions, but it’s done in a way very different from how you guess you would do it in Spotfire, and that’s why it took me awhile to figure out.
Here’s an overview of how to do it. You create a DocumentProperty which is a binary object, you write some Spotfire code that gives a value to that Document Property, and you display that binary object using a Spotfire Property Control of the “Label” type.
The confusing parts are that you DON’T use the Spotfire “Insert Image” tool at all, and that you DON’T use the filename generated inside the R code in Spotfire at all. Once you get used to the idea that the two most obvious ways you think you would approach the problem in Spotfire are entirely useless and wrong, you can make some progress.
I’ll leave out the spiderplot specifics because the code’s pretty long.
Here’s what you do.
1) Create a document Property in Spotfire of type “Binary”, e.g., “imageThatGoesBackToSpotfire”
2) You write some R code that generates an image and writes it to a file:
# get a temporary directory name on the local machine. You wouldn’t need to do this is you were just
# going to run it on your own, but you need to do it if you intend to let anybody else run it on their own machine.
tempfilebase = tempfile()
# take the tempfilebase and prepend it to a filename.
myFilename<-“someFileName.jpg”
myFullFilename <- paste(tempfilebase,myFilename,sep="")
#open a jpeg
jpeg(filename=myFullFileName)
# generate the image, however you normally would in R
plot(input)
# close the file
dev.off
# open a connection to that file.
myConnection<-file(myFullFileName,open=”rb”)
imageThatGoesBackToSpotfire<- data.frame(r=readBin(myConnection, what="raw", n=(file.info(myFullFileName)$size)))
close(myConnection)
3) Run your R script, above. Select some columns that are the “input” to the plot, and make the R script return outputs to the “imageThatGoesBackToSpotfire” DocumentProperties.
4) Create a text area in Spotfire.
5) Insert a Property Control into the text area of type “label”. (Click on the icon that’s circled in the picture below). This opens a dialog,
You need to register a data function with inputs and outputs, and the specific PNG data needs to be returned as a binary label.
Some details: http://spotfire.tibco.com/tips/2014/02/25/dynamically-displaying-images-in-a-text-area/
I have the following problem using R and not found a solution so far:
I have a script where I run several operation and generate some plots. At the end, I would like to have a nice piece of code that automatically saves all the plots generated into the current working directory. So far, I am using:
trellis.device(device="png", filename="Plot_A.png")
print(Plot_A)
dev.off()
Which is working fine for just one specific plot. Now I am looking for some kind of for loop that takes all the plots and saves them with the name of the plot as a png file
In grid based plotting packages (lattice and ggplot), you can store the plot in an object and call print on them to trigger actual rendering of the plot. What you could do is not render the image on the spot, but append any plots to a list. Then, at the end, you can loop over the plots and output them.
plot_list = list()
lattice_plot = xyplot()
plot_list = append(plot_list, lattice_plot)
for(plot in plot_list) {
png('name.png')
print(plot)
dev.off()
}
Not exactly an answer but an alternative workflow.
If you are saving your plots in order to use it somewhere else, for example to include them in a Word document or in a presentation, you could just put your code in an RMarkdown document and knitr it to generate an html or doc document with all the output generated by the code, including plots. With RStudio all that could be done with a few clicks.
It may even be easier to take all plots from the Word document than from a folder of png files.