hi folks, I was wondering if anybody could give me some advice. I've created a stacked barchart, with 'car model' along the x axis, 'number of cars' along the y axis. There are 45 individuals involved, each of which can own any number of cars, of any model (eg an individual could own two cars of one model, and another car of a different model). I've got a legend by the side of the barchart which gives the name of the individual, which gives the colour to identify which bars belong to which individuals.
The problem (as you've probably guessed) is that it's almost impossible to have a distinctive legend for 45 individuals. I can manage 30 distinctive colors, but as soon as I use shaded lines the number of distinct colours drops considerably because the legend boxes are so small. This is true even if I vary line density and angle. Therefore, after a long period of experimentation, I'm thinking of giving up on barchart. What I have in mind now is a plot where each 'bar' is a single line, and the top of each 'bar' is a symbol (+, *, etc). I figure it should be possible to find 45 different symbols. Does anyone have any advice? I'm sorry this is so open-ended, but I've played with stripchart and dotplot without a lot of joy. I figure this can't be that uncommon a need (barchart with a ridiculous number of groups), but I could well be wrong. Is there some way of altering the size of the legend boxes in the barchart? Using symbols in the barchart? Some way of using, say, 30 blocks of colour, and 15 cases of a dashed line? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Paul -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/advice-for-alternative-to-barchart-tp22795050p22795050.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.