Saving plots

We can save a plot in various formats, such as .jpeg, .svg, .pdf, or .png. I prefer saving a plot as a .png file, as it is easier to edit a plot with Inkspace if saved in the PNG format.

How to do it…

To save a plot in the .png format, we can use the png() function as follows:

png("TEST.png", width = 300, height = 600)
plot(x,y, xlab = "x axis", ylab = "y axis", cex.lab = 3,col.lab = "red", main = "some data", cex.main=1.5, col.main = "red")
dev.off()

How it works…

We have used the png() function to save the plot as a PNG. To save a plot as a PDF, SVG, or JPEG, we can use the pdf(), svg(), or jpeg() functions, respectively.

The first argument in the png() function is the name of the file with the extension, followed by the width and height of the plot. We can now use the plot() function to generate a plot; any subsequent plots will also be saved with a .png extension, unless the dev.off() function is passed. The dev.off() function instructs R that we do not need to save the plots.