[Rd] A small modification of plot.acf (patch)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 25 May 2008, Андрей Парамонов wrote:

> In one of my scripts I used plot.acf function, but I had to modify it
> a little to suit my needs. Although my modifications are minor, I
> believe some people might benefit from it.
>
> The problem: currently, in cross-correlation plots main title captions
> are constructed of 2 names separated by '&' symbol. Such captions
> occupy too much horizontal space and usually don't fit in plot. A
> better solution would be to split a caption in two lines (each name on
> its separate line).

That is the part that needs justification.  I've never seen an example 
where that was the case (and you don't give one), and I use acf() a lot. 
The examples fit and their series names are not particularly short.

Also, the user has the option to supply 'main' to plot.acf via '...', so 
why is that not sufficient?  And you can even suppress the title by 
main="" and use title() for even more control.


> I attach a patch which adds an option to do so. Please review it and
> tell me if such things are worth including into upstream version. I
> have never contributed code for R project before, so please be patient
> and tell me if I'm missing some fundamental things (like compatibility
> with S or whatever).
>
> The patch attached does 2 things:
>
> 1) Adds new argument main.sep. It allows to customize the titles. Now
> you can even pass main.sep value containing '\n', so two parts of the
> caption come on different lines. The default value preserves original
> behavior.
>
> 2) Changes main title captions positioning behavior. Now they are
> positioned automatically, which ensures nicely looking captions when
> main.sep containing '\n' is used.
>
> If you think the patch might be useful, please let me know and I will
> submit necessary modifications to the Rd file.
>
> Andrey Paramonov
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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