Why when I do a  "help(plot)" do I not see anything about parameters
such as xlim or ylim?  As someone new to R, finding that xlim and ylim
even existed wasn't all that easy. Even help.search("xlim") shows
nothing once I know xlim exists.  

I'd like to change the default axes but "help(axis)" isn't that
informative about changing the frequency of ticks on the axes.

Do people really refer to the x-axis as "1" and the y-axis as "2" as
shown in help(axis)? 

   plot(1:4, rnorm(4), axes=FALSE)
   axis(1, 1:4, LETTERS[1:4])
   axis(2)

I hadn't a clue what the "1" and "2" meant here without reading
additional documentation.  And where is the "LETTERS" constant defined
and what else is defined there?

Are there no common R constants defined somewhere so the axes be defined
symbolically?  Perhaps AXIS_X = 1, AXIS_Y = 2 would be better than just
"1" and "2":

   plot(1:4, rnorm(4), axes=FALSE)
   axis(AXIS_X, 1:4, LETTERS[1:4])
   axis(AXIS_Y)

This would at least provide a clue about what is going on here.

Why is R such a graphics rich language and the documentation is so
lacking in graphics examples?  Why can't the documentation include
graphics too so one can study code and graphics at the same time?  How
do I know the graphics I'm seeing is what it's supposed to look like?

I'd rather do more in R than MatLab but I find the R documentation
somewhat lacking.  I prefer not to read the R source code to find the
answers.

Thanks for any insight about this.

efg




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