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

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: