Finding the "height of a line of text" for axis
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 11:06 +0100, Steven J. Murdoch wrote:
I would like to draw only the ticks of an axis, but not the axis
itself. I don't think this can be done using axis(), so I am trying to
write a cut-down version in R, which only draws ticks.
The point at which I am stuck is that the length of a tick is set by
par("tcl") as a fraction of the "height of a line of text". So I would
like to draw a line whose length is also this length. However I cannot
find out how to convert the into units I can pass into lines(). I
thought par("cxy"), but it is too large, as is shown in the code
below. Here the red tick marks are longer than the black ones created
by axis. I have found the relevant function in plot.c:
"GConvertYUnits(Rf_gpptr(dd)->tcl, LINES, NFC, dd);"
but can't find the corresponding R function.
Can anyone suggest how to find this out, or solve the problem in a
different way?
# Inward pointing ticks
par("tcl"=1)
drawticks <- function(at) {
# Start of the ticks
base<-par("usr")[1]
# Length of the ticks
l<-par("cxy")[2]*par("tcl")
for (i in at) {
lines(c(base,base+l),rep(i,2),col="red")
}
}
# Test plot
plot(c(1,2,3), axes=FALSE)
# Draw ticks in red
drawticks(axTicks(2))
# Overprint with normal axis
axis(2, axTicks(2))
Steven, Are you trying to do something like this: plot(1:5, axes = FALSE) axis(1, col.axis = "white", tcl = 1) axis(2, col.axis = "white", tcl = 1) or perhaps something like this: plot(1:5, axes = FALSE) axis(1, col.axis = "white", col = "red", tcl = 1) axis(1, col.axis = "white", col = "black", tcl = 0) axis(2, col.axis = "white", col = "red", tcl = 1) axis(2, col.axis = "white", col = "black", tcl = 0) or even something like this: plot(1:5, axes = FALSE) axis(1, col.axis = "white", col = "red", tcl = 1) axis(1, col.axis = "white", col = "white", tcl = 0) axis(2, col.axis = "white", col = "red", tcl = 1) axis(2, col.axis = "white", col = "white", tcl = 0) If you do not want the axis labels, use: plot(1:5, axes = FALSE, ann = FALSE) HTH, Marc Schwartz