[cc'd to package maintainer]
This feels like a fairly straightforward question, so I'm surprised
not to have found an answer so far (RSiteSearch, package help,
vignette ...)
It seems fairly hard (without some fairly serious hacking) to
hard-code the axis limits in a hexbin plot from the hexbin package.
Here's what I've figured out so far:
* when you do the hexagonal binning in the first place, you can
specify the x and y ranges (xbnds, ybnds). Fine ... but ...
* the plot method for 'hexbin' objects (which doesn't have
'xlim' or
'ylim' arguments) calls hexViewport as
hexViewport(x, offset = unit(legend, "inches"))
* in the absence of explicit 'xbnds'/'ybnds' arguments,
hexViewport does
xyb <- smartBnds(x)
hvp at xscale <- xs <- if (is.null(xbnds))
xyb$xr
else xbnds
hvp at yscale <- ys <- if (is.null(ybnds))
xyb$yr
else ybnds
It looks like hexbin:::smartBnds computes x and y ranges from the
hexagonal cells in
the object, not looking at the xbnds and ybnds slots ...
There are various ways to change this. If left to my own devices I
will probably hack a version
of the plot method that has explicit xlim and ylim arguments, but I
wanted to (1) check that I wasn't
missing anything obvious and (2) see if the package maintainer would
be interested in a patch ...
I think hexbin is reasonably widely used (or should be) and this
seems like a common requirement,
so (as I said) I'm surprised it hasn't come up.
Ben Bolker
