Hello,
I wish to customize the tick marks and labels of axes in panels produced by
high-level lattice functions, namely xyplot. I know I can use the scales
argument to specify values for rot, cex, etc. in the top-level call. 

However, I am interested in determining values for cex and rot based on the
current panel / viewport and device. More specifically, I would like to make
adjustments when tick labels overlap on the x-axis, such as labels of a
factor. If I use base graphics, par("cin") or par("cxy") or strwidth(), etc.
can be used to develop an algorithm to adjust cex or/and rot if needed.

I am trying to determine the parameters/settings in grid analogous to
par("cin"), etc. mentioned above, knowing that par() has no effect in
lattice / grid. I have dug around the sources for grid and lattice but
cannot seem to come up with such parameters -- most notably something like
strwidth(). I see that panel.axis() has a check.overlap argument for labels,
but I could not trace down the actual code to see how that works. What have
I overlooked, or where should I be looking?

Indirectly related, setting outside=TRUE in a panel.axis() call does not
produce visible labels, perhaps due to "issues of clipping" as mentioned in
its help page. How might one disable clipping for the current panel /
viewport?

Thanks in advance for any pointers or advice.

Best Regards,
Bill

PS: I apologies if this came thru in HTML format -- the formatting is
applied to "Plain Text" messages as the corporate MS-Exchange server level,
and I am trying to overcome that.

-------------------------------
Bill Pikounis, PhD

Nonclinical Statistics
Centocor, Inc.
200 Great Valley Parkway
MailStop C4-1
Malvern, PA 19355


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