Importing Vector Graphics The grImport Package for strongRstrong.pdf

Importing Vector Graphics: The grImport Package for R Paul Murrell The University of Auckland Abstract This introduction to the grImport package is a modified version of Murrell (2009), which was published in the Journal of Statistical Software. This article describes an approach to importing vector-based graphical images into statistical software as implemented in a package called grImport for the R statistical com- puting environment. This approach assumes that an original image can be transformed into a PostScript format (i.e., the opriginal image is in a standard vector graphics format such as PostScript, PDF, or SVG). The grImport package consists of three components: a function for converting PostScript files to an R-specific XML format; a function for read- ing the XML format into special Picture objects in R; and functions for manipulating and drawing Picture objects. Several examples and applications are presented, including annotating a statistical plot with an imported logo and using imported images as plotting symbols. Keywords :˜PostScript, R, statistical graphics, XML. 1. Introduction One of the important features of statistical software is the ability to create sophisticated statistical plots of data. Software systems such as the lattice (Sarkar 2008) package in R (R Development Core Team 2008) can produce complex images from a very compact expression. For example, the following code is all that is needed to produce the image in Figure 1, which shows density estimates for the number of moves in a set of chess games, broken down by the result of the games. R xyplot(Freq ~ nm