[R] New trellis settings

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Monday 29 November 2004 22:39, dhinds at sonic.net wrote:
> I've just upgraded to 2.0.1 and was taken by surprise by the changes
> in graphical parameter handling for lattice plots.  I'd previously
> been using 1.9.1.  The old settings seem to have been replaced by a
> daunting number of new options.  

Not really. The old settings are essentially what they were, the new 
'options' are for things that used to be hard-coded in previous 
versions.

> I've poked around a bit and have not 
> seen any discussion of the changes in the newsletter or on r-help but
> maybe I'm overlooking something?
> 
> Specifically, I have some code that in the past changed the relative
> proportions of text versus the plot area using:
>
>   trellis.par.set('fontsize', list(text=8))
>
> which caused all text to get smaller, and the plot area to grow to
> fill the larger available space.  Now, the plot area does not grow on
> its own.  

That does seem to have been a side-effect in 1.9.1, but it was never 
intended. I would consider that behaviour a bug, not a feature.

> I've tried fiddling with layout.heights, layout.widths, and 
> axis.components but there are dozens of settings available.  For many
> of these settings, I have no idea what quantity I'm actually
> changing, other than by trial and error.  Is there an easier way?

Not really. The recommended thing to change is the settings (not the 
options) which all default to 1:

> str(trellis.par.get()$layout.heights)
List of 18
 $ top.padding      : num 1
 $ main             : num 1
 $ main.key.padding : num 1
 $ key.top          : num 1
 $ key.axis.padding : num 1
 ...

I was hoping that the names would be enough of a hint. Anything with 
'padding' in the name is space, and probably the ones you want to 
change.

Deepayan