Send textual R output to a graphics device

Divert R's standard text output to a graphics device.

sinkplot(operation = c("start", "plot", "cancel"), ...)

Arguments

operation

See below

...

Plot arguments. (Ignored unless operation="plot").

Details

This function allows the printed output of R commands to be captured and displayed on a graphics device.

The capture process is started by calling sinkplot("start"). Now R commands can be executed and all printed output (except errors) will be captured. When the desired text has been captured sinkplot("plot") can be called to actually display the output. sinkplot("cancel") can be used to abort the output capture without plotting.

The current implementation does not allow sinkplot to be nested.

Value

Invisibly returns a character vector containing one element for each line of the captured output.

References

Functionality requested by Kevin Wright kwright@eskimo.com in the R-devel newlist posting https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2004-January/028483.html.

Author

Gregory R. Warnes greg@warnes.net

See also

capture.output, textplot

Examples

   set.seed(12456)
   x <- factor(sample( LETTERS[1:5], 50, replace=TRUE))
   y <- rnorm(50, mean=as.numeric(x), sd=1)

   ## construct a figure showing a box plot of the data, followed by an
   ## analysis of variance table for the data
   layout(cbind(1:2), heights=c(2,1))

   boxplot(y~x, col="darkgreen")

   sinkplot()
   anova(lm(y~x))
#> Analysis of Variance Table
#> 
#> Response: y
#>           Df  Sum Sq Mean Sq F value    Pr(>F)    
#> x          4 120.475 30.1188  30.399 2.824e-12 ***
#> Residuals 45  44.585  0.9908                      
#> ---
#> Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
   sinkplot("plot",col="darkgreen")
#> Error in max(sapply(unlist(slist), strwidth, cex = cex)): invalid 'type' (list) of argument