Producing a vector graphics image (i.e. metafile) in R suitable for printing in Word 2007

Question

First a caveat: I posted this question here on SuperUser, but it is clearly the wrong place to ask R questions. I recognize that it is not directly a programming question,

Answer 1

Your only option is to use high resolution raster graphics. Once you're over 300 dpi it will be completely indistinguishable from vector printed; it will just make larger files.. Your copy and paste method is coming in at 72 dpi and will look terrible. If you import from a file you can get the resolution in the file and things will be much better. Fortunately Office 2007 is supposed to handle png images, which have the best compression for typical graphs. Let's say you wanted the image 4" wide and 6" high...

png('printsGreat.png', width = 4, height = 6, units = 'in', res = 300)
plot(c(1:100), c(1:100), pch=20)
dev.off()

Also, Office 2007 is supposed to be able to handle EPS files and R postscript files are by default EPS compatible when you print one page.

postscript("printsPerfectly.eps", width = 4, height = 6, horizontal = FALSE, onefile = FALSE)
plot(c(1:100), c(1:100), pch=20)
dev.off()

But if you don't have luck with them go back to the high resolution image.

Answer 2

What @Tom Wenseleers said:

The current best answer above to me is not acceptable, since if one goes to the trouble of making a nice vector based figure, the last thing one would like to do is just rasterize it to a bitmap... Unless it's an increadibly complex graph that takes ages to render in vector format, or something like that, but for most graphs that's not the case.

For me, there is a new best answer to this question, since graph2ppt and graph2doc tend to move axis labels around (which apparently cannot be fixed; see here: https://github.com/davidgohel/rvg/blob/master/R/body_add_vg.R and here: export::graph2office moves axis labels around).

I think that .svg is the most appropriate vector format for usage with publication graphics. The only drawback is that older versions of e.g. MS Word cannot handle it. IN R, you could use the native graphics::svg - device. However, I'd recommend to use CairoSVG from the Cairo - Package, especially when you are working with non-native fonts (e.g. via the extrafont - package), because in contrast to graphics::svg, Cairo::CairoSVG embeds fonts quite nicely (without relying on GhostScript, if I am right).

If you are working with an older version of MS Word, you could use incscape (a free vector graphic editor) and convert your graph to .wmf, for example (which might be better than printing to .wmf directly, because R rasterizes points when exporting .wmf files).

An example:

## create plot
library (ggplot2)
library (extrafont) 
# note: if you want to use other fonts than the standard ones - in this example "ChantillyLH" -
# you must register your fonts via
# font_import () ##run only once (type "y" in the console)
# and
# loadfonts (device = "win") ##run only once.
# Otherwise, the extrafont - package is not needed.

beautiful_plot <- 
ggplot (data = iris, mapping = aes (x = Sepal.Length, y = Petal.Length)) +
    geom_point () +
    theme (text = element_text (size = 18,  
                                family = "ChantillyLH")
           )

# export SVG 
library (Cairo)

CairoSVG ("My_Path/My_Plot.svg", width = 6, height = 6)
print (beautiful_plot)
dev.off ()
# the resulting SVG-file is in the the "My_Path" - Folder.

In Incscape, it looks like this:

Answer 3

My preferred solution is to use the windows metafile device for plotting, e.g.:

win.metafile("mygraph.wmf")
print(gg1)
dev.off()

This produces a *.wmf file that can be copy-pasted into the word file.

Answer 4

Since I tried to produce png at high res in R and it didn't seem to work on my PC (if I set the resolution higher than, say, 300 dpi, R would produce an error like "cannot start png device"), the way I found was to save the figure using postscript() and then use GSView to convert the ps file into png with 600 dpi resolution. MS Word consumes the png's happily and the quality of print seems to be perfect.

Answer 5

The devEMF package seems to produce graphics that look nicer than the default wmf when pasted into PowerPoint.

Answer 6

The current best answer above to me is not acceptable, since if one goes to the trouble of making a nice vector based figure, the last thing one would like to do is just rasterize it to a bitmap... Unless it's an increadibly complex graph that takes ages to render in vector format, or something like that, but for most graphs that's not the case.

The best solution is to export to Word directly in native Office vector format. I just made a new package, export, that allows one to do exactly that an allows export of either graphs or statistical tables to Word and Powerpoint, see https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/export/index.html and for demo see https://github.com/tomwenseleers/export

For example:

install.packages("export")
library(export)

?graph2ppt
?graph2doc
?table2ppt
?table2doc

## export of ggplot2 plot
library(ggplot2)
qplot(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length, data = iris, color = Species, 
      size = Petal.Width, alpha = I(0.7))
# export to Word
graph2doc(file="ggplot2_plot.docx", width=7, height=5) 
# export to Powerpoint      
graph2ppt(file="ggplot2_plot.pptx", width=7, height=5)

You can also export to enhanced metafile using the function

graph2emf(file="ggplot2_plot.emf", width=7, height=5)

but the quality of the native Office format is better.

For final production you can also readily print it to PDF from Powerpoint if need be, and it will stay nicely in vector format then.