On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Andrew Nikitin <ns...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > From: June Kim (???) <junea...@gmail.com> > > When there are overlapping xlabels in plot, what are the options to > resolve > > this situation? > > > > Common solutions are 1) rotating the xlabels by 90(or 45) degrees, 2) > > staggering labels[1], 3) making the graph big enough so that the labels > > don't overlap, 4) abbreviate all x labels and provide a legend for them. > > > > First of all, thank you for your reply. > 1 and 2 is out of the question, since both are not supported by the plot > (I live in J6.02, not sure whether the new package has further development). > That's too bad. How is plot's drawtext implemented in the low level? It seems like to call 11!:0 y. Is there any possibility to implement a new feature easily? This leaves you pretty much with 3 or 4. > Yeah. As I experimented with option 3, which is making the graph big enough, the labels get too small to read them. What I did with my plot(a sorted histogram for a categorical variable) was: pd 'labelfont Arial 5' pd 'pdf c:\temp\histogram.pdf 1400 200' As you can imagine it, it becomes difficult to switch between looking at the forest(overall patterns) and the trees(figuring out which data it is) with this width-long graph. I'm not so satisfied with the result. I also use something of 1.1 -- if a category has long labels, I place them > on Y axis, this has effect of labels being perpendicular to the axis and > occupying less space along the axis. > > That's a clever idea, but looking at a 90 degrees rotated histogram is unnatural to many people. :( > I am not sure staggering is such a good idea. The axis in the exmaple in > the link does not look easy to read. But maybe there is more than one thing > wrong with that exmaple and has nothing to do with staggering per se. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
