Copy R plot to clipboard with custom size

Question

Is there a way to get R / RStudio to copy a plot to the clipboard with a custom size?

RStudio has this function, but you have to define the size everytime and there is some extra clicking which I am sure is avoidable.

I tried my best with saving as jpeg or else with file="clipboard" and then - after plotting - dev.off(). No error messages, but also nothing in the clipboard.

Here is an example:

data(mtcars)
jpeg(file = "clipboard",width = 800, height = 600, units = "px", pointsize = 12,
     quality = 100,
     bg = "white", res = NA, family = "", restoreConsole = T)
hist(mtcars$mpg)
dev.off()

Any ideas on how this can be achieved?

Answer 1

The best way would be to be able to control the size in Rstudio, but as you have found out yourself from the Rstudio-website, Rstudio doesn't support that. The following code saves your plot to wmf. There is also a workaround to a save to bitmap, which involves some clicking, but at least you don't have to specify the size any more:

data(mtcars)
windows(800, 600, pointsize = 12) #opens a separate window with the size you want 
hist(mtcars$mpg) #draw to this (active) window
savePlot("clipboard", type="wmf") #saves plot to WMF

Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to save to jpg format to the clipboard. You can copy it to a bitmap by going to this window, click CTRL-C and the graph is on the clipboard as bitmap with 800:600.

EDIT: The windows command only works on Windows.
For Mac, it should be replaced by: quartz(width=8,height=6,pointsize=12,dpi=100) (width/height in inches!)

For linux try x11(width=8,height=6,pointsize=12,dpi=100) (untested).