how to show a plot without overlaying the text on top of the another text?

Hi Marna,
After a bit of experimenting I came up with the following function
that "flags" each point to be labeled an allows the operator to
manually place the label for that point:

placeLabels<-function(x,y,labels,pointer=TRUE,cex=1,labelcol=par("fg"),
 labelbg="white",border=par("fg"),pointercol=par("fg"),
 pch=1,col=1,bg="white",flagcol="red") {

 nlabels<-length(labels)
 if(length(labelcol) < nlabels) labelcol<-rep(labelcol,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(labelbg) < nlabels) labelbg<-rep(labelbg,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(border) < nlabels) border<-rep(border,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(pointercol) < nlabels) pointercol<-rep(pointercol,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(pch) < nlabels) pch<-rep(pch,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(col) < nlabels) col<-rep(col,length.out=nlabels)
 if(length(bg) < nlabels) bg<-rep(bg,length.out=nlabels)
 for(i in 1:nlabels) {
  points(x[i],y[i],pch=19,col=flagcol)
  labelxy<-locator(1)
  if(pointer)
   segments(x[i],y[i],labelxy$x,labelxy$y,col=pointercol[i])
  boxed.labels(labelxy$x,labelxy$y,labels[i],
   col=labelcol[i],bg=labelbg[i],border=border[i])
  points(rep(x[i],2),rep(y[i],2),pch=c(19,pch[i]),
   col=c("white",col[i]),bg=c(NA,bg[i]))
 }
}
x<-rnorm(10)
y<-rnorm(10)
plot(x,y)
library(plotrix)
placeLabels(x,y,LETTERS[1:10],flagcol="purple")

Jim

Hi R user,
I have created using metaNMDS (Nonmetirc Multidimensional Scaling, MDS) to
show species composition but some of the species are concentrated at some
of the sites so that the name of the species are overlaid and it was
almost impossible to read the species name in the figure. I was wondering how
we can show the plot without overlaying the text on top of another.
I used the following to create the plot. would you mind to suggest me?

comm.bc.mds <- metaMDS(dat, dist = "bray")
ordiplot(comm.bc.mds, display = "sites", type = "text")
ordipointlabel(comm.bc.mds,font = c(1, 1), cex = c(0.5, 0.3))

Thanks

MW

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