R help - Dec 2000 - Legends on plots

I'm trying to develop a systematic way of placing legends on (among other 
things) scatterplots of grouped data.  The journals in my field can be very 
fussy about the placement of figure legends.  Typically they want them to 
be in either of two places - the upper left corner of the plotting area, 
not obscuring any data points, or outside the plotting area in the lower 
right hand corner of the figure with the bottom of the legend aligned with 
the x-axis line.

My preference is to place them in the upper left-hand corner of the 
plotting area if space is available.  I can do this interactively with 
locator(1), and I can place them directly by querying par("usr") to
find
the coordinates of the upper left-hand corner.  I prefer the latter 
solution, but obviously I have to know that there will be no data points 
obscured by this placement.   What is the recommended programming solution 
to determine whether enough plot space exists to place the legend in this 
location?

Thanks,



====================Dr. Marc R. Feldesman
Professor and Chairman
Anthropology Department
Portland State University
1721 SW Broadway
Portland, Oregon 97201
email:  feldesmanm at pdx.edu
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fax:    503-725-3905
http://web.pdx.edu/~h1mf
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=====================
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At 02:49 PM 12/21/00 -0800, Marc Feldesman wrote:

 >the coordinates of the upper left-hand corner.  I prefer the latter
 >solution, but obviously I have to know that there will be no data points
 >obscured by this placement.   What is the recommended programming solution
 >to determine whether enough plot space exists to place the legend in this
 >location?


I know the obvious answer is to LOOK at the plot to see if there is enough 
space, but I'm talking about doing this systematically with as many as 25 
or 30 different plots in succession.  It would be a lot handier to let the 
program do the work for me than to manually place legends on each graph.

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Check Frank Harrell's "hmisc" collection on the S archive
(http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/S/Harrell).  He explicitly forbids porting to R,
but I can't imagine it's illegal or even unethical to look at his code
to
see what he does -- he has some fairly fancy stuff for auto-placement of
legends/text that you might be able to adapt.

-- 
318 Carr Hall                                bolker at zoo.ufl.edu
Zoology Department, University of Florida    http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/bolker
Box 118525                                   (ph)  352-392-5697
Gainesville, FL 32611-8525                   (fax) 352-392-3704

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