On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 8:05 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 itself being superceded.
In my opinion that can and should happen, but my prediction is that R has such a big lead in terms of available functionality and packages that no one will catch up for at least a decade. 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 ! As others have mentioned we can probably help you if you give us a reproducible example and a clear description of what you are trying to accomplish. Absent that this just sounds like complaining for the sake of it. > > So my general question is - why isn't ggplot2 already part > of R base I think packages are added to the base distribution relatively infrequently these days. Is install.packages("ggplot2") really an issue? - 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 ?? I'm not understanding what you are trying to say here. - also personally I would scrap > qplot as an unnecessary distraction which is not easier to implement > than ggplot). ggplot2 is in maintenance mode, so it is unlikely that major changes like that will be introduced. In general duplication of packages for plot and ggplot > doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm not sure what kind of duplication you are referring to here, though in general I also wish there was less duplicated functionality spread across various R packages. > > > 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). library(ggplot2) d1 <- data.frame(x = 1, y = 1, t = "some text") d2 <- d1 d2$x <- 2 ggplot(d1, aes(x = x, y = y, label = t)) + geom_text(hjust = 0, size = 10) + geom_text(data=d2, fontface="italic", hjust=1, size = 10) Works for me. > > 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 ? Probably never (though you could do it yourself if you think it is worth spending the time to improve it). > > 3) A related question to (2) is: where is geom_textbox ? I don't think there is one. You could make one following the documentation at https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/wiki/Creating-a-new-geom > > 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). Lot's of people publish ggplot2 graphs, standards differ from field to field and from journal to journal. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14238124760782644329&as_sdt=40000005&sciodt=0,22&hl=en will give you some examples. Beyond that I think you'll have to be more specific about what exactly you want the graphs to look like. > > 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.