[R] illustration of graphics terms in R?

[Tom Arnold]

Hello,
I'm using R to do survey analysis and plotting. I've gotten good help on this
list to sort out specific plotting issues, but I think I could do a lot more
on my own if I could find a good reference that explained some of the graphics
terms and concepts used by R. I haven't found a general discussion of the
graphics environment, with illustrations. Part of my problem is that the help
text is all text. There are no figures to illustrate the terms used.  For
example, I would like to be able to *see* the relationship of these concepts
illustrated:

figure region
device region
plot region
user coordinates
normalized device coordinates
margin
outer margin

Also, there are a number of par settings that apparently work on the same
underlying data but using different units. For example, oma, omi, omd; mai and
mar. The documentation for "mar" says: "A numerical vector of the form
'c(bottom, left, top, right)' which gives the lines of margin to be specified
on the four sides of the plot..." After some experimentation I found that csi
* mar = mai, so I guess mar is "lines of text" of size "csi". But all this
could be much better illustrated if it were... illustrated.

If there is no such introduction with diagrams to show the relation of the
different par values, I suppose I could start to create one, but could
certainly use help, if only in editing, from someone who actually *knows* how
this stuff works.

Thanks for whatever guidance you may be able to offer.
-Tom

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