I was trying to recreate this kind of timeline plot:
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelArticles/create-a-timeline.html

As you can see in their excel example, the events are nicely placed out on
both sides of the timeline axis.

AFAIK there is no function to do this nicely in R-project. Furthermore,
graphics and lattice packages are unable to draw the x-axis in the middle of
the plot. (datapoints cannot be plotted below the axis, as in the Excel
example).

My question: Is there a function to draw the x-axis inside the plot? (at a
certain vertical position?) Is there a function for the whole timeline plot
that I do not know about?

I tried to visually replicate the plot using additional elements to create
my own x-axis (code below). I have placed the x-axis ticks on a fixed
y-height (-0.1 and -0.05), but this might look badly with a different
dataset or at other image proportions. I'd rather do this with a dedicated
package function ( like axis() ).

--
mrgomel
-----------------------
Below is my example code in R:


the_data <-
structure(list(eventtime = c(1914L, 1917L, 1918L, 1939L, 1945L,
1963L, 1989L, 2001L, 2003L), impact = c(1, -.5, 0.8, 1, 0.8, 0.5,
-.5, 0.5, 1), label = structure(c(8L, 7L, 4L, 9L, 5L, 2L, 3L,
1L, 6L), .Label = c("9/11", "Cuban crisis", "end of communism",
"end WW1", "end WW2", "Iraq war", "start of communism", "WW1",
"WW2"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("eventtime", "impact",
"label"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -9L))


plot(the_data$eventtime, the_data$impact, type="h", frame.plot=FALSE, axes =
FALSE, xlab="",ylab="", col="grey")
text(the_data$eventtime,the_data$impact, the_data$label)
#axis(1)
abline(h=0,lwd=2)
text(axTicks(1),-0.1, axTicks(1))
points(axTicks(1),rep(-0.05,length(axTicks(1))), type="h")

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