Jeremy: I suggest you have a look at the latest edition of Paul Murrell's book, "R Graphics", as you seem to be unaware that ggplot2 (as well as a 3rd graphics paradigm, the lattice package) and base graphics are built on 2 different and incompatible graphics engines.
Obviously, you are entitled to your opinions and graphical predilections vary, but I do not think R-Help is a good venue for these sorts of discussions. The R-devel list might be a better place to discuss such matters. Cheers, Bert Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics (650) 467-7374 "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom." Clifford Stoll On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 5:05 AM, Jeremy Clark <jeremyclark...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear All, > > First of all, many thanks to all R contributors for a fantastic > program, and especially to Hadley Wickham for creating ggplot2. The > following is intended to be a warning that, if the apparently > superficial problems described are not sorted out, R could well find > itself being superceded. The reason is that a new user wants to draw a > graph, and perhaps publish in a scientific journal a graph created > using R, well before wanting to do a complex regression (and the > latter is relatively easy). So here goes: > > 1) The saga of the straight line. I implemented a geom_abline - it > looked superb. Unfortunately I had to disable clip to allow text - now > my abline looked ridiculous. My search found plotrix: ablineclip - > fantastic I thought - but it applies to plot and not geom_plot. I > switched to geom_segment - the rendering looked trash. I switched to > geom_smooth - should work but as I don't know the x values beforehand > I'll have to clip a new dataframe - it that a hassle ? - Yes it is ! > > So my general question is - why isn't ggplot2 already part > of R base - or at least if someone is to create useful packages for > plot - perhaps a subtle hint could be made that they should also apply > to ggplot2 (and perhaps to lattice ?? - also personally I would scrap > qplot as an unnecessary distraction which is not easier to implement > than ggplot). In general duplication of packages for plot and ggplot > doesn't seem like a good idea. > > > 2) The saga of the italic letter. I found, to my dismay, that to > insert an italic letter into my plot I had to learn a whole new > language called plotmath - which wouldn't accept normal R coding, and > didn't even have normal control functions such as /n for a new line. > This is ridiculous (and I'm not sure how plotmath managed to get into > R base). > > So my question is, when is plotmath going to have a > complete overhaul to allow eg. "," instead of, or as well as, ~,~, and > normal control functions such as \n ? > > 3) A related question to (2) is: where is geom_textbox ? > > 4) Where are examples with scientific graph defaults ? (meaning a > two-axis graph which is publishable - I will post my own after this is > published in a years time, but as suggested above, while the graph > looks good the implementation of this is not pretty). > > Having said that - good luck with implementation - and many thanks for > all your hard work ! > > Yours sincerely, > > Abiologist > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.