is it possible to display plots in an emacs buffer?

[Angel Lopez]

Thanks all for the comments. A sort summary for the records:
- I haven't got SAS but I'll study with care the code sent by Rodney.
As far as I've understood there are too simple ways of viewing the 
graphs produced by R:

1)Stephen suggested having both emacs and the plot window side by side like:
---------  -------
|       |  |     |
| emacs |  | plot|
|       |  |     |
|       |  -------
---------
My screen is big enough for that but There is usually some unused space 
bellow the plot window. That made me want to have an emacs window like:
----------------
|source| plot  |
| file |       |
|      |       |
----------------
|     R        |
----------------

  and hence my request.

2) Charles suggested using the Alt-tab feature of some desktops.  I used 
to do it with the mouse and that was where my lose of efficiency was. 
Using Alt-tab is so convenient that leaves me with no answer for "other 
than "coolness", is why? "
Thanks,
Angel

A.J. Rossini wrote:
> "Charles C. Berry" <cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>On Fri, 21 May 2004, Angel Lopez wrote:
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>
>>>I'll explain the idea a bit more. When I am working in emacs and make a 
>>>plot, a new X11 window opens, I see the plot and to get back to emacs I 
>>>have to close or minimize the X11, I loose quite a lot of time doing 
>>>this every day. Wouldn't it be great if the plots could be displayed 
>>>directly inside an emacs buffer?
>>>
>>
>>After seeing the responses to this I wonder if I have missed something, 
>>but...
>>
>>This sounds like a job for the desktop environment to handle. 
>>
>>What desktop do you use??
>>
>>On KDE and Windows (at least) 'alt-TAB' will allow you to maximize and/or
>>bring-to-front another window. On various Solaris desktops the 'front' and
>>'open' keys on the Sun keyboard handle those operations.
>>
>>Maybe something similar applies for your desktop.
> 
> 
> That's one use-case and solution.
> 
> Here's another:
> 
> Create a means of hinting that a code set generates a figure, add 2
> buttons (hyperlinks/actions) in-lined near the plot or par commands,
> and have a thumbnail present.
> 
> Use of the buttons: 
> 1. bring up a viewer of the png/ps/pdf figure,
> 2. (re)generate the figure
> 
> hinting code be an Sweave code chunk with fig=TRUE, or some other
> markup.  
> 
> There was (still is) a very nice XEmacs-only Noweb mode which adds
> buttons for navigation between code chunks AND REFERENCE hints, when
> noweb-style referencing (currently ignored by Sweave) are used.
> 
> If only we'd used:
> 
> <<chunkName>>=
> 
> @ %ref %fig TRUE %option Setting
> 
> style parameters instead of 
> 
> 
> <<chunkName,option=Setting>>=
> 
> @
> 
> Then this would have been a trivial extension (of course, only for
> XEmacs, not a general solution, sigh...).
> 
> best,
> -tony
>