Why are Quartz plots much bigger than they used to be?
R versions before 2.7.0 had a Quartz window that was smaller both in size and scale. This was caused by two “bugs”: all devices in R have a default size of 7 inches. Quartz used a default of 5 inches and that was now changed to match all other devices. In addition, Quartz was incorrectly assuming a resolution of 72dpi for all screens. This means that a plot was drawn at ca. 3/4 of its intended size (given that most modern monitors use 100 dpi or more). The new Quartz device correctly detects the resolution of a screen by default and thus the plots will appear larger than they used to be.
