NEWS.md

In Sharpie/RTikZDevice: R Graphics Output in LaTeX Format

Changes in version 0.6.2 (2011-11-13)

New Features

• The annotation system has been improved. A new function tikzNode has been added that makes it easy to insert TikZ nodes with custom options and content. tikzCoord is now a wrapper for tikzNode that simplifies the function call required to get a plain coordinate.

• Annotation of Grid graphics is now supported. New functions tikzAnnotateGrob, tikzNodeGrob and tikzCoordGrob allow the creation of Grid grobs that execute annotiation commands when drawn to a tikz device. Wrapper functions grid.tikzAnnotate, grid.tikzNode and grid.tikzCoord are also provided. The necessary transformations between Grid coordinates, which are viewport-centric, to absolute device coordinates are handled by a new function gridToDevice.

• Support has been added for the dev.capabilities function in R 2.14.0.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the outline of the background bounding box was being drawn with the forground color instead of the background color. This was unnoticible except when a non-white background was used. Thanks to Matthieu Stigler for reporting.

Behind the Scenes

• The tikzDevice is now checked with "visual regression testing" which compares the results of graphics tests against a set of standard images using a visual diff. If a change occurs that significantly affects font metrics or graphics primitives the effects will show up in the diff. Currently, ImageMagick's compare utility is used to calculate differences. This process was inspired by the work of Paul Murrell and Stephen Gardiner on the graphicsQC package. Future versions of the tikzDevice may use graphicsQC to perform this task.

• The tikzDevice Vignette used to employ a rather ugly hack that re-wrote the internals of the Sweave driver during processing in order to gain more control over syntax highlighting. This hack has been replaced by TeX macros that achieve the same result without messing with R.

Changes in version 0.6.1 (2011-4-14)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where tikz was not applying background color to the plot canvas.

• Fixed a Vignette bug caused by an incorrect merge that was breaking the CRAN build.

Changes in version 0.6.0 (2011-4-13)

New Features

• Unicode Support!!!! XeLaTeX may now be used calculate metrics and widths for Unicode characters. PdfLaTeX remains the default LaTeX compiler, but this may be changed by setting the global option tikzDefaultEngine to xetex.

• New global option tikzXelatexPackages which contains packages necessary to use unicode characters with xelatex. Specifically, the fontspec and the xunicode packages as well as the xetex option to the preview package.

• New global option tikzUnicodeMetricPackages which contains the packages necessary to calculate metrics for multibyte unicode characters with xelatex.

• New function anyMultibyteUTF8Characters() which will check if the given string contains any multibyte unicode characters. Exposed in the package namespace since it is general and may be useful in other applications.

• The TikZ device now fully supports the Raster graphics primitive that was added in R 2.11.0 and no longer throws "not implemented" warnings when this functionality is used. This is accompilshed by writing raster images to PNG files, Rplots_ras#.png, which are then included in the main TeX file Rplots.tex.

• The TikZ device now fully supports the polypath graphics primitive that was added in R 2.12.0 and no longer throws "not implemented" warnings when this functionality is used.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the lwd parameter used to control line widths was declared by tikzDevice to be of type int when it is actually a double. This was causing line widths to be ignored or miscalculated. Many thanks to Baptiste Auguie for reporting this issue.

Depreciation Notices

• Versions of R < 2.11.0 are no longer supported due to lack of required functions for handling Unicode strings.

Behind the Scenes

• New Makefile for executing common development tasks.

• Package documentation now handled by roxygen. Many thanks to Hadley Wickham and Yihui Xie for the Rd2roxygen package which facilitated this switch.

• Package test suite completely overhauled and now based on Hadley Wickham's test_that unit testing framework.

Changes in version 0.5.3

Bug Fixes

• R 2.12.x now throws a warning message when shell commands run via system() have non-zero exit conditions. The metric calculation runs LaTeX on a file containing an \@@end command. This causes a non zero exit condition. The end result was that users were getting spammed by warning messages. These messages have been gagged for now and a better way to run LaTeX such that a non-zero condition can meaningfully indicate an error is being investigated.

• The range of characters the default sanitizer looks for has been extended. It should now process all characters that are special to TeX with the exception of backslashes. Documentation has been improved.

• Detection of failed string metric calculations has been strengthened and the resulting error message has been improved.

Changes in version 0.5.2

Contributors

The following people contributed to this release of the tikzDevice:

• mlt for reporting problems with the Sanitize function that led to the discovery of two situations where buffer overflows were occurring.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed buffer overflows and memory leaks related to string pointers in tikzDevice.c.

• Fixed compilation of the tikzDevice vignette under R 2.12.0.

• Reduced the verbosity of the package startup message.

Changes in version 0.5.1

Bug Fixes

• A stub function has been added so that the polypath() function introduced in R 2.12.0 won't crash the device.

• Fixed bug where no string output was shown when the sanitize=TRUE option was used.

• The path to a LaTeX compiler returned by Sys.which() is now checked by file.access() to check that it is actually an executable and not an error message. This fixes issues arising from Sys.which() on Solaris.

• On UNIX platforms, /usr/texbin/pdflatex is added to the end of the list of places to search for a LaTeX compiler. This should help people using R.app on OS X find a LaTeX compiler without having to manually specify it.

• tikz() produces a better error message when it cannot open a file for output.

• In the event that LaTeX crashes during a metric calculation, the LaTeX log output is echoed using message() instead of cat(). This makes it show up during operations that supperss cat() output such as R CMD build and R CMD Sweave.

Changes in version 0.5.0

Contributors

The following people contributed to this release of the tikzDevice:

• Lorenzo Isella contributed bug reports and examples that led to the discovery of a bug in fontsize calculations that appeared when certain LaTeX commands were used to change the active font.

• Vivianne Vilar for spotting spelling and grammar errors in the vignette.

• Gabor Grothendieck for the idea for sending output to the screen for use with sink() (i.e. the "console" option)

New Features

• "console" option for directing tikz() output back into the R console instead of to a file.

• Preliminary support for a "sanitize" option which allows automatic escaping of characters that have special meaning to TeX like "$" and "%".

• tikzAnnotate() and tikzCoord() functions. tikzAnnotate() allows arbitrary LaTeX code to be injected into the output stream of an active tikz() graphics device. tikzCoord() is a wrapper for tikzAnnotate() that inserts named locations into the graphics code. These locations may be referenced by other TikZ drawing commands.

Bug Fixes

• Removed bad colon in the DESCRIPTION file.

• Proper fontsize calculations now include ps from par() and fontsize from gpar(). This fixes issues with lattice-based graphics such as ggplot2.

• Metrics are now calculated properly when commands like \renewcommand\rmdefault are used to adjust the active font.

• Sanitization of % signs in labels.

• The package no longer overwrites user customizations set in places like .Rprofile with default values when loaded.

• Attempting to use new graphics functions such as rasterImage() now produces error messages instead of fatal crashes in R 2.11.0 and above.

Changes in version 0.4.0

• Initial Beta Release
• Support for all essential graphical parameters: colors, line types, line weights, semi-transparency, line endings and line joining.
• String width and character metrics are calculated by direct calls to a LaTeX compiler. This is an inefficient but robust method. Some of the inefficiency of this method is compensated for by storing calculated string widths in a database managed by the filehash package. This way if we pay a computational price to compute the width of a string, we hopefully only pay it once.

Sharpie/RTikZDevice documentation built on May 9, 2019, 7:07 p.m.