[Rd] [R] dotchart: Gap between text and chart (PR#8681)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/13/2006 12:55 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, murdoch at stats.uwo.ca wrote:
> 
>> (Moved from r-help)
>>
>> On 3/13/2006 9:33 AM, Dietrich Trenkler wrote:
>>> I have some data which I would like to display with dotchart. The
>>> labels are very long, so the chart becomes too small. Setting cex=0.7
>>> seems to be a good compromise, but the gap between the text and the
>>> chart still is too large. I did not find a "gap" parameter in the
>>> description of dotchart...
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help.
>>>
>>> D. Trenkler
>>>
>>>
>>> "a" <- structure(c(103.35, 36.73, 55.09, 302.66, 68.54, 35.46,
>>>     138.65, 25.21, 110.85, 6.66, 46.57, 70.23), .Names =
>>> c("Nahrungsmittel und alkoholfreie Getraenke",
>>>     "Alkoholische Getraenke, Tabakwaren", "Bekleidung und Schuhe",
>>>     "Wohnungsmieten, Energie", "Einrichtungsgegenstaende",
>>> "Gesundheitspflege",
>>>     "Verkehr", "Nachrichtenuebermittlung", "Freizeit, Unterhaltung  und
>>> Kultur",
>>>     "Bildungswesen", "Beherbergungs und Gaststaettendienstleistungen",
>>>     "Andere Waren und Dienstleistungen"))
>>>
>>> dotchart(sort(a))
>>> dotchart(sort(a),cex=0.7)
>>
>> I've determined that this is a bug in dotchart.  It miscalculates the
>> height of a line of text in the right margin, using
>>
>>  lheight <- strheight("M", "inch")
>>
>> which doesn't give the right answer.  You get the correct answer in this
>> case by putting
>>
>>  lheight <- par("mai")[2]/par("mar")[2]
>>
>> but that's not a general solution, as the denominator may be zero.
>>
>> I'll look for a better solution.
> 
> Like setting mai not mar?  The ratio is par("csi"), by the way.

Yes, setting mai rather than mar simplifies the code a bit, but some 
parts still need to work in lines, because mtext doesn't accept 
positioning arguments in inches.  I've used par("csi") in place of the 
ratio now, and am about to commit to r-devel and r-patched.

Duncan Murdoch