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swcarpentry / r-novice-gapminder

R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis
http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-gapminder/
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Is "pdf device" a commonly understood term? #853

Open maneesha opened 1 year ago

maneesha commented 1 year ago

The saving plots section describes how to create a pdf device. I don't know what that means - is this a commonly understood term? If not, consider defining this term here. Googling "pdf device" doesn't help.

zkamvar commented 1 year ago

+1 to updating the wording here. FWIW, "pdf device" is referring to a "graphics device" that writes to a PDF file. It's like X11 is the default graphics device on Unix systems running the X environment.

I believe that "graphics device" itself is an old term that predates R referring to a physical device that would plot a graph, but the term has come to encompass the concept of a particular graphics window (e.g. the RStudio plot window), a file, or an old school plotting device.

See https://fosstodon.org/@gaborcsardi/110714022208130620: