Question

Is it possible to make a base Graphics-library plot portable in the same way that ggplot plots are portable? That is, you can pass the plot to various functions and call print(plot) without encountering an error.

Answer 1

The pair of functions recordPlot() and replayPlot() do something similar to, but not exactly like this. One difference is that, unlike with ggplot2 and lattice graphics, the figure must be first plotted to a graphics device before it is recorded.

# Plot and then record a figure
plot(rnorm(99))
recPlot <- recordPlot()
dev.off()

# Plot recorded figure to default graphics device
replayPlot(recPlot)

# Plot recorded figure to the pdf graphics device
pdf("eg.pdf")
replayPlot(recPlot)
dev.off()

# Look at the data structure that stores the plot
str(rPlot)