Michael,
The plot method for SpatialLinesDataFrame objects resides in package sp,
and questions regarding it are easier noticed on the r-sig-geo mailing
list.
The reason why they are plotted with aspect ratio 1 is that they are
assumed to be spatial (geographical) data, and assume that 1 m
I'm running windows xp, R 2.3.1 with maptools 0.6-6, I guess.
When plotting from a large SpatialLinesDataFrame and using xlim ylim to
reduce the area, the plot axes automatically have the same scale size, even if
xlim and ylim ranges differ.
E.g.:
tmp - readShapeLines(filepath)
