Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

Motivated by the excellent R package pgfSweave, I begin to notice the font families in my graphs when writing Sweave documents. The default font family for PDF graphs is Helvetica, which is, in most cases (I think), inconsistent with the LaTeX font styles. Some common font families are listed in ?postscript, and we can take a look at them by:

for (f in c("AvantGarde", "Bookman", "Courier", "Helvetica",
    "Helvetica-Narrow", "NewCenturySchoolbook", "Palatino", "Times")) {
    pdf.options(family = f)
    pdf(paste(f, ".pdf", sep = ""))
    set.seed(123)
    plot(rnorm(25), pch = 1:25, xlab = "xlab family", ylab = "ylab font",
        main = paste("Font Families in R (PDF):", f))
    text(13, 0, "Text in the Middle")
    mtext(sprintf("pdf.options(family = \"%s\")", f), side = 4)
    dev.off()
}

Here is a merged PDF containing the above single PDF files:

R-PDF-font-families.pdf (29K)

It seems that "Bookman", "NewCenturySchoolbook", "Palatino" and "Times" can be better choices when using Sweave because they are serif fonts, which are usually more consistent with LaTeX PDF.

For a long time I’ve been wondering why we are not able to use Enter in the LyX Scrap environment which was set up by Gregor Gorjanc for Sweave. Two weeks ago, I (finally!) could not help asking Gregor about this issue, as I’m using “LyX + Sweave” more and more in my daily work. He explained it here: LyX-Sweave: mandatory use of control+enter in code chunks

After digging into the LyX customization manual for a while, I found a solution which allows us to press the Enter key just as we normally do when typing in a LyX document. The key is to use Environment instead of paragraph as LatexType for the style definition of Scrap. Besides, I used the LatexName as wrapsweave, as a LatexName is required by LyX. The definition for wrapsweave is simple: just two empty lines by \par. (If you define it as \newenvironment{wrapsweave}{}{}, you will run into troubles sometimes; especially when you use indent for paragraphs.)

As we know, LaTeX environment cannot be centered in LyX (only paragraphs can), so I defined a special environment ScrapCenter when I want to insert graphics via Sweave and make them center-aligned.