[R] fighting with ps.options and xlim/ylim

ivo welch ivo.welch at yale.edu
Wed Jun 9 00:34:04 CEST 2004


sorry to impose again. 

At the default point size, R seems very good in selecting nice xlim/ylim 
parameters, and leaving a little bit of space at the edges of its 
xlim/ylim.  alas, I now need to create ps graphics that can only occupy 
a quarter of a page, so I need to blow up the text for readability.  
Easy, I thought: make ps.options(pointsize=24).  Alas, this turns out to 
be trickier than I thought.

In plot, autogenerated xlim and ylim should now probably be scaled a 
little, though more importantly, there needs to be more space at the 
edge (e.g., if ylim=c(1,2), R seems to really draw axes from about 0.9 
to 1.1).  if I do not increase this space, my axis label names overflow, 
as do some text() annotations that are inside xlim/ylim, but have 
pos=1.  (e.g., text(1,1,"something", pos=1) in the example; at standard 
point size, this fits nicely; just no longer.)

how to create smaller figures than full page is probably not an 
infrequent need.  has anyone written a "smallpostscript-figures" 
package, which sets this and perhaps other parameters?

if not, how do I tell R that

     * the usual space it leaves at the xlim/ylim needs to be bigger now?

    * that I would like it to be more generous/less generous in its 
autogeneration of good ylim/xlim default coordinates

help appreciated.

regards,

/iaw




More information about the R-help mailing list