R help - Jan 2005 - Fine tuning scatterplot() (car package)

Hello all!

System: R2.0.1, W2k. 
All packages apdated with update.packages().
I use the default graphic device for my system (no active choice).

I?m trying to fine-tune scatterplot() graphs (package car), for
publication.
I want to control plotting symbols and colours to match plots from
other, less flexible, systems. I also need to make all text and
symbols bigger, to enable printing of the plots in smaller scale than
the original outputs.

My strategy has been to start in Rcmdr, using the command line
produced there and rerun variants of the scatterplot() call directly 
in the console.  

After consulting MASS and CAR, the colour and characters were easy to
fix by overrunning the defaults with col=c() and pch=c(). 

But the size of letters and figures beats me so far. I?ve tried cex
and csi 
in the same positiones as col and pch on the line. "cex" doesn?t do
anything as far as I can see, "csi" produces warning messages (which
is some sort of effect!) but does nothing on the size.

Trying to tune with these commands inside xlab and ylab calls (based
on the defaults from the documentation) results in unspecified syntax
error messages.

My code in the console is this for the moment:
> scatterplot(Kernel.protein~TC.OS | Year, reg.line=FALSE, 
        smooth=FALSE, labels=FALSE, boxplots=FALSE, span=0.5, 
        by.groups=TRUE,
col=c("","red","blue","black"),
pch=c(15,4,5),
 
        data=ecpa.f)

Which produces nice plots, but with too small symbols, letters an
numbers.

Thanks!
/CG

CG Pettersson, MSci, PhD Stud.
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Dep. of Ecology and Crop Production. Box 7043
SE-750 07 Uppsala

Dear CG,

When I wrote the scatterplot() function I expected it to be used in data
exploration and didn't anticipate its use for publication graphics. 

That said, it wouldn't be hard to add the full set of cex* arguments and to
pass these through to plot() and points(). I'll do this for the next release
of the car package, but in the meantime, you could do it for yourself.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Regards,
 John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
-------------------------------- 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of CG Pettersson
> Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 5:26 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Fine tuning scatterplot() (car package)
> 
> Hello all!
> 
> System: R2.0.1, W2k. 
> All packages apdated with update.packages().
> I use the default graphic device for my system (no active choice).
> 
> I?m trying to fine-tune scatterplot() graphs (package car), 
> for publication.
> I want to control plotting symbols and colours to match plots 
> from other, less flexible, systems. I also need to make all 
> text and symbols bigger, to enable printing of the plots in 
> smaller scale than the original outputs.
> 
> My strategy has been to start in Rcmdr, using the command 
> line produced there and rerun variants of the scatterplot() 
> call directly in the console.  
> 
> After consulting MASS and CAR, the colour and characters were 
> easy to fix by overrunning the defaults with col=c() and pch=c(). 
> 
> But the size of letters and figures beats me so far. I?ve 
> tried cex and csi in the same positiones as col and pch on 
> the line. "cex" doesn?t do anything as far as I can see, 
> "csi" produces warning messages (which is some sort of 
> effect!) but does nothing on the size.
> 
> Trying to tune with these commands inside xlab and ylab calls 
> (based on the defaults from the documentation) results in 
> unspecified syntax error messages.
> 
> My code in the console is this for the moment:
> 
> > scatterplot(Kernel.protein~TC.OS | Year, reg.line=FALSE,
>         smooth=FALSE, labels=FALSE, boxplots=FALSE, span=0.5, 
>         by.groups=TRUE,
col=c("","red","blue","black"),
pch=c(15,4,5),
>  
>         data=ecpa.f)
> 
> Which produces nice plots, but with too small symbols, 
> letters an numbers.
> 
> Thanks!
> /CG
> 
> CG Pettersson, MSci, PhD Stud.
> Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Dep. of Ecology 
> and Crop Production. Box 7043 SE-750 07 Uppsala
> 
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