Display Lists in R Paul Murrell and Ross Ihaka A display list is a record of the drawing operations used to produce a picture. A display list can be used to refresh an on-screen picture or to copy a picture from, say, the screen to a file format like PDF. A display list differs from something like a "backing store", which is only a record of the *output* of drawing operations, because a display list works at a higher level, capturing a *description* of what has been drawn. This talk will discuss the fact that there are several levels at which a display list can work, explain why the initial implementation of display lists in R is too low, describe an augmentation of the display list mechanism in R which is higher, and demonstrate some examples where higher is better and other examples where higher is worse.