R Scale plot elements within PDF of set width and height

Question

Though R plots sent to a PDF can be rescaled at will in an illustration or page layout software, scientific journals often insist that the plots provided have specific dimension

Answer 1

An option equally good or better than pdf is tiff. All journals I have come across like tiff.

tiff(filename="name.tiff", width=5, height=5, units="in",
     pointsize=8, compression="lzw", bg="white", res=600,
     restoreConsole=TRUE)
qplot(data=iris, x=Petal.Width, y=Petal.Length, colour=Species)
dev.off()

If you are on linux, drop restoreConsole=TRUE, seems only windows likes that.