graphing R in org-babel

Question

How can I get a graph back in my org-babel results for R code?

#+BEGIN_SRC R :results output latex 
boxplot(islands)
#+END_SRC

Islands is a baked in dataset for R.

Do you do it with

#+resname:

and org-auto-load-images = T in your .emacs?

resname example

Answer 1

You're very close! Two changes:

For the R code, you'll need a few more headers:

#+BEGIN_SRC R :results output graphics :file test.png
  library("ggplot2")
  ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Width, y = Sepal.Length, color = Species)) +
  geom_point()
#+END_SRC

(Note that the headers change slightly depending on whether you want to use base R, as in your example, or something like ggplot2, as in mine. See the docs here for more exposition on this. TL;DR: include output if you want to use ggplot2 et al.)

To display the image, you've got a couple choices:

• org-toggle-inline-images will switch inline image display on and off
• org-startup-with-inline-images is a variable which can be set in your config files (init.el / .emacs.d / whathaveyou). If non-nil, images will be shown by default on buffer load.

Also useful is org-redisplay-inline-images, for refreshing an image that's changed on disk if org doesn't auto-reload it.