Y-Axis Label Overwritten By TickMark Values
On Sat, 2005-10-01 at 16:00 -0500, Paul Roebuck wrote:
On Sat, 1 Oct 2005, Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-01 at 06:07 -0500, Paul Roebuck wrote:
Can someone tell me how to fix the left margin of plot region such that the tick values don't overwrite the x-axis label? I haven't been able to set the correct par option to fix this...
This is the Y axis label, not the X axis.
Oops. I'd been up all night...
Been there, done that... ;-)
Set par("mar") prior to creating the plot to increase the left
hand margin space and then use mtext() rather than title() to
move the Y axis label further left by using the 'line' argument.
[SNIP code]
See ?par and ?mtext for more information.
What a black art. Pray tell where you learned this that I
may study there as well. In at least one of my prior attempts,
I had used par("mar") but hadn't realized that title(ylab)
would have to be changed; it just didn't seem (to me anyway)
like wanting to display slightly larger numbers as tickmark
values would have required using other low-level plot commands.
Look under the Documentation/Manuals link on the R Home page and read through "An Introduction to R". That's the place to start. Searching the e-mail list archives is yet another resource: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/search.html There is also a relatively new R Graphics Gallery (with code) here: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/index.php <shameless plug> Paul Murrell's new book "R Graphics" More info here: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/RGraphics/rgraphics.html </shameless plug>
After about a hour of trying different options, I found myself really wanting to use the "R Plot Wizard(TM)" that lets you interactively set the LAF of the plot, then generates the appropriate R code to make it so.
No MS-like Wizards here...Only the intelligent human ones ;-)
BTW, I would not use 'tcl = 0.3' which, as a positive value, places the tick marks themselves within the plot region. That's contrary to typical guidance, since the tick marks get lost in this plot and more importantly, can overwrite data points in certain plot types.
Was emulating Matlab's plot output and that's how it places tickmarks (for better or worse). I actually needed to place tickmarks on all sides but hadn't found that option yet.
I'd say for worse...See Cleveland and/or Tufte for references. There is a foundational reason for the way R does things: Sensible Defaults. See ?axis (using 'side = 3' and 'side = 4') for more information here. HTH, Marc Schwartz