Re: [Gretl-users] Problems with R function in foreign block

On Fri, 9 Mar 2018, Artur Tarassow wrote: > Thank you for this updated script, Allin. It works fine. However, here > (ubuntu 17.10.) the figure appears and actually stays permanently. I > can't even close it without closing gretl. For the moment this doesn't > bother me. And no, I did not find an option to avoid the figure > showing up... :-/

The two packages you loaded in your script at http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-users/2018-March/013035.html , namely Cairo and cairoDevice, are not complementary, they're competitors (not unusual for R packages). So I've tried each of them individually (script below). Both of them work when the script is run in gretlcli -- and in that context cairoDevice is better in one way: it respects your request to use the Times font, which is ignored by the Cairo package. However, when run via the gretl GUI the cairoDevice variant fails. Neither of the packages respects your par() setting of "las=1" (axis labels always horizontal). The graphics system seems to depend on a bunch of inscrutable global variables over which the packages have an insecure degree of control. Maybe it's unfair, but I have a sense of package writers not quite knowing what they're doing in this area.

As for the flashing (or persistent) X11 window showing a simplified version of the plot we're trying to write to PNG, it seems to be a feature of R that you can't turn that off. However, by sticking "dev.off()" before the call to Cairo() I was able (on my system at any rate) to get the X11 window just to flash, and not persist, when using gretl_x11. (Using gretlcli it always just flashed.)