[Rd] Interest in R plotting capabilities

[Telford Tendys]

I'm a scheme and C user generally, I'm a bit wary of the large FORTRAN
content of the R language but aside from that issue it seems nice and simple
and easy to use.

What I want to do is find some GPL software to replace gnuplot,
and since R does all the calculating stuff that gnuplot does (probably
R is faster though I haven't tested) plus R has quite decent
plotting capabilities I thought that R might make a good candidate
for a plotting program.

I had a few problems in some particular areas though... gnuplot
can produce mesh plots of a 3D surface from regular grid samples in x,y,z
coordintes. Does R have a package that does anything like that?
Also, gnuplot supports both hidden-line mode (very slow but gets there)
and non-hidden line mode.

Another thing gnuplot can do is generate 2D contours from regular
grid samples of a 3D function. Is there any contour generation system
for R?

One final question, I looked over the GNU libplot library and it seems
to have excellent device handling capabilities and some decent font
selections but the actual plotting side of things is not nearly as good
as R. It seems kind of logical to add a module to R that provides all
the libplot devices as R devices since this would give the best of both
worlds and should require only ``glue'' code. Anyone thought of something
like this already?

By the way, I put some of my notes together as I was learning R and they
are at:

	http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~telford/samples/R/

Hopefully I'll add to it as I figure things out but it could provide a
good place for beginners to start since it includes all the really
simple stuff that I had to figure out (I have no S reference). If someone
is writing an R tutorial, and if it will be under GPL, then they can grab
whatever they like from my notes.

	- Tel

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