[R] Newbie: Barchart Gray with White Grid?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Tom Hopper wrote:

> I'm just getting in to R, been reading manuals (thanks to all who 
> provided pointers to good docs!), and messing with different commands. 
> I'd appreciate a little help with this exploration, and I hope that my 
> question is relatively easy to answer (probably, there's a simple way 
> to do what I'm working toward).
> 
> R's statistical functions are coming along easily enough, but graphics 
> seem to be a little tougher for me, probably because I'm used to 
> working in SigmaPlot. As an exercise, I tried to create a gray bar 
> chart with white grid overlay, like the one on page 128 of Tufte's 
> "Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I  figure this would 
> cover a lot of the basic techniques that I'll need for "real" work. I 
> got as far as having a gray bar chart (I was working within hist(), 
> mostly) with white borders, white (on white background) axes, white 
> grid *under* the bars, and both x- and y-axis labels (both the numeric 
> or categorical label, and the axis titles...I don't quite remember the 
> correct terms in R).
> 
> I wasn't able to find a way to display only the gridlines parallel to 
> the x-axis, or to overlay that grid on top of the bars, or to turn off 
> the numeric labels on the x-axis without touching the y-axis, or to 
> show the x-axis as a gray line without showing the y-axis.

?grid (and the hint in the details).

?par and look at xaxt and yaxt.  Then use axis() to add the axes you want.

-- 
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)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595