I am having some trouble getting the colors correct on county maps using the maps package. I have a data.frame that contains coloration data for every county -- it also contains a variable 'mapm' which fits the 'state,county' format used in the mapping package. I use this to define colors from a range of 1:100. The problem is that the colors seem good for some states/counties, but random for others. It is almost as if the index has been scrambled, but I find that the ordering is fine in the data.frame. I am completely confused, any guidance as to what simple thing that I am missing here. Any suggestions greatly appreciated. data(countyMapEnv) all.names <- map('county',namesonly=T) all.names1 <- data.frame(mapm=all.names, col=NA,ordin=1:length (all.names)) # created a dataframe, to be sure of the # order, I include a variable 'ordin' to index later # next I merge in the data to use for coloration # the merge works well, with every element matched t <- merge(final[,c('PVar','mapm')],all.names1) # check order once more (redundant perhaps, but I was desperate) t <- t[order(t$ordin),] # a little accounting for the colors t$PVar <- (t$PVar-min(t$PVar,na.rm=T))/(max(t$PVar,na.rm=T)-min(t $PVar,na.rm=T)) t$col <- round((((t$PVar*100)-100)*-1),0) # t$col is now a collection of integers from 1 to 100 # again, redundancy out of desperation. matchm <- match.map('county',t$mapm,exact=T,warn=T) # define colors with the heat.map palette color <- heat.colors(100)[t$col[matchm]] # alternative (also not working) color <- heat.colors(100)[t$col] # use the colors to fill the map map('county',fill=T,col=color) Michaell Taylor -- ===============Michaell Taylor, Phd Principal Boxwood Means, Inc Two Stamford Landing Suite 100 68 Southfield Avenue Stamford, CT 06902 (T) 203-653-4100