One common problem with graphs realized with R is that many elements end up being too small for their target usage: on slides or in papers, it's often very hard to read text elements such as legends, axes labels, etc. There is a fairly simple solution to this (disclaimer: I mean that it works on my system and I can see reasons why it would work more broadly). If you know in advance what will be the final size of your graph in your paper you can tell that to R and it will make appropriate size decisions for you.


<h3>Illustration</h3>

Here is the kind of difference you can get simply by changing the saving command: <a href="dummygraph.R">R-code</a>

<p><table>
<tr>
	<td><img src="plot1.png" height="270"></td>
	<td><img src="plot2.png" height="270"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</p>



<h3>Option 1: if you save your graphs from a plotting window using the File menu</h3>
[you can in principle skip the first step if you know how to manipulate plotting windows]
<ol type="a">
<li>Plot your graph</li>
<li>Adjust the size of the plotting window: make it small if you want to eventually get relatively large fonts</li>
<li>Plot your graph again</li>
<li>Now you can save your graph</li>
</ol>

<h3>Option 2: if you use a command to save your graph</h3>

<ul>
<li> In many cases you can specify the final size of your graph within the saving command. 
<ul>
<li>If you use <b>ggplot</b> to create your graphs (which you should), ggsave does that perfectly well:</br>
<a href="http://docs.ggplot2.org/0.9.2.1/ggsave.html" target="_blank">Doc for ggsave</a></br>
As you can see the default values for width and height are taken from the size of the current plotting window, this is the basic problem all the way.</li>

<li><b>quartz.save</b> also has these options. Here the default values are for a 7in by 7in graph, which is rarely what you want for a paper.</li>
</ul>
</li>

<li> Adjusting the size of the window in advance may also do the trick. That basically works if your saving function takes the default size values from the size of the current plotting window (ggsave) but not if the default values are fixed (as the 7in for quartz.save). </li>

</ul>

<h3>Bonus</h3>
Putting together Option 1 and Option 2 you can now probably see that what does the trick in Option 1 is that the default size for the saving function in the R-menu uses the size of the current plotting window to define the size of the graph you are saving: what you see is what you save.