[R] Dirty Rotten Hack. (reversing tickmarks on axes?)

[Allen S. Rout]

I feel dirty.


I have some graphs I'm building to communicate chargeback rates and service
usage for our backup system here at the University of Florida.  These come
down to daily data points on a graph of number-of-bytes transferred and
stored. 

Since we chargeback on the same basis (price per MB this, price per KB that)
the same chart with a different scale can be used to communicate bytes and
dollars. I set about trying to accomplish this like so:

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~asr/media/r-foo/try1.png

Those axes are a little messy. I tried nudging them around

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~asr/media/r-foo/try2.png

which is better but not good.  What I really want to do is tell my axis()
function to reverse the tick direction:  put your ticks and labels "inside"
the graph.  Something like

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~asr/media/r-foo/dirty-hack.png

which I accomplished by telling axis() 'line=-47.7'. 

Eugh.

Note that the distance between the left side and the right is different
between the right side to the left. :)   I don't particularly object to this,
when you abuse a tool in this manner you need to expect oddities.

I've wandered through the mailing list logs, and haven't seen reference to
this particular desire.  Am I alone? :) 



- Allen S. Rout