Can I use cairoDevice in R under Windows?

Question

Currently, on my R 2.10.1 installation on Windows XP,

capabilities()["cairo"]

returns False. Loading the package cairoDevice fails with the message "LoadLibrary failure" however the shared library "C:/Programme/R/R-2.10.1/library/cairoDevice/libs/cairoDevice.dll" is there. Any ideas how I can make cairo work on windows?

Answer 1

The capabilities refers to the R binary and its compile-time options.

The add-on package could or should still work. You may need to install the Gtk2 libraries this depends upon. This is the same for other packages using RGtk2 such as, say, Rattle. See eg this message by Brian Ripley.