graphicsr
Is there a way to export plots from R directly to latex, more specifically TexStudio? I think exporting/saving the image from R and then importing it to R looses some of the quality. I saw on the internet that I can use tikz package and try to re-create the plot in Latex but that can't re-create all of my plots. Isn't there a way to do the code in R and export it directly to tex?
I'm trying to get the best image quality as possible for my thesis.
If it gets to the point where a PDF is bigger than a PNG at a high resolution for your end use, then make a high-resolution PNG file. For example, for a figure that will be 4 inches square on a page for print, you want 300dpi x 4 = 1200 pixels. So do:
png(file="plot1.png",width=1200,height=1200)
makemyplot()
dev.off() # close the png file
The cutoff point for this will vary on how much the PNG compression algorithm can do and how much overlapping "ink" you've got - all the ink in a PDF takes space, but you can do a million points to a PNG at the same location and it will only be a few bytes.
There are also assorted PDF compression tools, but I'm guessing you're on Windows and I use Unix command-line tools. While I'm on about command line tools, you can probably convert existing PDFs to raster PNGs with the 'convert' tool from the ImageMagick suite.
But 600k isn't that big. I'm working on a book with 2 megabyte PDFs on almost every page.
In ConTeXt, you can use the filter module for such tasks. In fact, the filter module is a generalization of ConTeXt MkII module m-r, which was designed for specifically what you are asking.
However, with the filter module it is easy to replicate the functionality for any language, so there is no MkIV version of m-r.
Here is a minimal example:
\usemodule[filter]
\defineexternalfilter
[R]
[
filtercommand={R CMD BATCH -q --save --restore \externalfilterinputfile\space \externalfilteroutputfile},
output=\externalfilterbasefile.out,
readcommand=\typefile,
read=no,
cache=yes,
]
\starttext
\startR
ushape <- c(rexp(500000), 12-rexp(500000))
pdf("ushape.pdf")
par(mfrow=c(1,2))
hist(ushape)
plot(density(ushape), main="Density")
dev.off()
\stopR
\startplacefigure[location=here, title={Output from R}]
\externalfigure[ushape.pdf][height=0.5\textheight]
\stopplacefigure
\stoptext
which gives
Note that the files are cahced, so subsequent runs are very quick.
Best Answer
If you save the plots in a scalable format such as PDF you should be able to include them with no loss of quaility in LaTeX using