plotrix-package: Specialized plots and plotting accessories
In plotrix: Various Plotting Functions

plotrix-package

R Documentation

Specialized plots and plotting accessories

Description

A large number of specialized plots and accessory functions like color scaling, text placement and legends.

Details

The plotrix package is intended to provide a method for getting many sorts of specialized plots quickly, yet allow easy customization of those plots without learning a great deal of specialized syntax. There are three major aims that can be represented as follows:

Fast foods

Think of plotrix as a graphics vending machine or fast graphics cafe. You walk in, make your choice and get your lunch. It may not be exactly the lunch you want, but you do get a pretty good lunch, fast. You can get junk food or health food, you make the choice.

Hot rods

You can customize plotrix as much as you want. Like the ageing machinery that is usually bolted into hot rods, the base graphics package is fairly easy to understand. plotrix is modular. You can create a frame for your plot, then you can add whatever bits you like to it instead of just taking the default plot that is available. You can have wide wheels and chromed exhaust pipes if you want.

No black boxes

If you want to go from pushing the fast food button to hot rodding, it's not hard. The source code in the functions is written to be understood. If something goes wrong, you can usually find where it happened right away and work on it. This means that you can learn about how the functions do what they do rather than just what they do. So that's how to write recursive functions in R!

Because plotrix encourages users to learn how it works, you usually begin to do so pretty quickly. Users often decide to write their own versions of plotrix functions and sometimes they contribute the results back into plotrix. You may find that you like other graphics systems like grid or lattice better. That's great, because one idea behind plotrix is that if you get into R and can get things done quickly and easily, you'll stick with it and soon want to get things done your way.