[R] Wrapping long labels in barplot(2)

Jim Lemon bitwrit at ozemail.com.au
Fri Apr 15 12:36:42 CEST 2005


Jan P. Smit wrote:
> I am using barplot, and barplot2 in the gregmisc bundle, in the 
> following way:
> 
> barplot2(sort(xtabs(expend / 1000 ~ theme)),
>     col = c(mdg7, mdg8, mdg3, mdg1), horiz = T, las = 1,
>     xlab = "$ '000", plot.grid = T)
> 
> The problem is that the values of 'theme', which is a factor, are in 
> some cases rather long, so that I would like to wrap/split them at a 
> space once they exceed, say, 20 characters. What I'm doing now is 
> specifying names.arg manually with '\n' where I want the breaks, but I 
> would like to automate the process.
> 
> I've looked for a solution using 'strwrap', but am not sure how to apply 
> it in this situation.
> 
You may find the staxlab function in the plotrix package to be helpful. 
It STaggers AXis LABels to allow fairly long strings to be displayed 
without overlapping.

Jim




More information about the R-help mailing list