[Rd] help text for xlim

Henrik Parn henrik.parn at bio.ntnu.no
Tue Apr 29 16:38:24 CEST 2008


Dear R-developers,

A student asked me today of how to specify the limits of the x-axis. I 
knew that he should use xlim, but I tried to encourage him to have a try 
himself with the various help functions. I do not judge if he used the 
correct search strategy or right key words, but anyway here is what he 
tried: he looked at ?plot. There xlim is not mentioned. He checked ?par. 
There you find xlim mentioned under the xaxs argument, but not how to 
specify xlim itself. He also failed with help.search("x-axis limits") 
and help.search("x-axis range") and dito apropos(). Neither did 
Rsitesearch() for these terms leed him reasonably straight to the xlim. 
Finally, he checked under See Also: plot.default, and there xlim is 
mentioned as argument, but it does not appear in the examples.

I think it is fair enough that xlim does not appear under ?plot or ?par, 
but would it be possible to add an explicit xlim example under 
plot.default and perhaps to make xlim more likely to be hit by 
'xlim-related' searches?


Best regards,

Henrik


 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.7.0 (2008-04-22)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United 
Kingdom.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United 
Kingdom.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252

WinXP

-- 
Henrik Pärn
Centre for Conservation Biology
Department of Biology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
NO-7491 Trondheim
Norway

Office: +47 73596285
Fax: +47 73596100
Mobile: +47 90989255

E-mail: henrik.parn at bio.ntnu.no



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