Drawing Diagrams with R

Authors

Paul Murrell, The University of Auckland

Date of this Version

6-2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2009) 1(1)

Comments

Copyright 2009, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

R provides a number of well-known high-level facilities for producing sophisticated statistical plots, including the “traditional” plots in the graphics pack age (R Development Core Team, 2008), the Trellis style plots provided by lattice (Sarkar, 2008), and the grammar-of-graphics-inspired approach of ggplot2 (Wickham, 2009). However, R also provides a powerful set of low level graphics facilities for drawing basic shapes and, more importantly, for arranging those shapes relative to each other, which can be used to draw a wide variety of graphical images. This article highlights some of R’s low-level graphics facilities by demonstrating their use in the production of diagrams. In particular, the focus will be on some of the useful things that can be done with the low-level facilities provided by the grid graphics package (Murrell, 2002, 2005b,a).