R: NEWS file for the gridGraphics package

NEWS	R Documentation

NEWS file for the gridGraphics package

Ensure use of Suggested packages is conditional (so plotdiff() only runs if the Suggested packages are available).

grid.echo() now supports stats::plot.hclust()
Fix for grid.echo.function() when start with no devices open (it was opening an extra device on exit).
Ensure old pdf(useDingbats=TRUE) behaviour for testing.

Protection against NA labels in text (so that they do not get echoed as "NA").

NOTE that his will NOT be fixed in grid because some existing packages relies on that grid behaviour.
Protection against NULL labels in text (so that grid does not complain about them).

Reported by Patrick Schratz.

New function echoGrob().
Echoing persp() now respects cex.axis setting (for size of tick labels).
Fixup for axis() when scale is reversed.
Fixes for C_axis() (and GMtext()) to use graphics::grconvertX() (and graphics::grconvertY) to calculate length of tick marks and placement of tick labels. This is to respond correctly to par() changes AFTER plot(), but before axis() (either via explicit par() calls, or implicitly when functions like dotchart() reset par() internally).

These changes make use of new deviceLoc() function and updated grconvertX() and grconvertY() functions in R 3.6.0.

Improved currentPar() function so that it behaves more like the graphics engine's ProcessInlinePars(). The main point is that setting a par() parameter in a high-level function is allowed to specify multiple values for the setting (whereas setting via par() itself only allows a single value per parameter setting).

Added magick and pdftools as (Suggests) dependencies, to provide better and more stable support for plotdiff().
Fixed clipping (of main contour region) bug for echoing filled.contour().

Added device argument to grid.echo() so that user can specify a “working device”. This is an in-memory PDF device by default, but that can have problems with fonts. Suggested by Claus Wilke.
Added capture of font family when echoing persp() plots. Reported by Claus Wilke.
Added names for grobs from echoing persp() and filled.contour().
Fix for echoing correct font settings in axis() and persp(). Reported by Claus Wilke.
Attempt to survive errors during echoing (like "figure margins too large") more elegantly

Fixed bug when echoing scatter plot with ZERO points in it. Reported by github user zxzb https://github.com/pmur002/gridgraphics/issues/9
Made plotdiff() more robust to unexpected output from ImageMagick's compare. Reported by Brian Ripley.
Added Zhijian (Jason) Wen as package author (it was he who contributed the persp() and filled.contour() support).

Changed stop() to warning() when call grid.echo() with empty “recordedplot” (suggested by Jonathon Godfrey).
Fixed examples for grid.echo() (patch by Josh O'Brien).
More robust Windows support for plotdiff() and plotcompare() (patch by Josh O'Brien).
Added defence against axis(line=) specification of length greater than 1 (reported by Jimmy Oh).
Added explicit handling of C_layout(), though handling does nothing (reported by Jimmy Oh).
Fixed drawing of ticks for axis(at=) when at exceeds range of axis scale. The ticks outside the axis scale range are now correctly clipped (reported by Jimmy Oh).
Future-proofed test script for hist.POSIXt() (so that the addition of new leap seconds does not generate errors about breaks not spanning the range of the data).

Added defence against code sending in NULL values in par() settings (e.g., sp does this with the xpd setting). These par() settings are ignored (to match internal graphics C code behaviour).

Fixed documentation of first argument in grid.echo() (it can be a function, not an expression).
Added better checking in plotdiff() for existence of convert and compare tools and for recent-enough version of R (to be able to perform the strict check for differences).