[R] Lattice: it seems, a bug in draw.key function

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Friday 20 May 2005 07:05 am, Wladimir Eremeev wrote:
> Dear r-help,
>
>   Now I am drawing graphs with xyplot function.
>
>   In order to place a legend under the plots I use the key argument in
> the xyplot function.
>
>   One of the 'key' components is 'divide', which defines a number of
>   points on the each line of the legend. The default is 3 points.
>   I would like a single point, so I set divide = 1.
>
>   Call to xyplot didn't produce any points at all.
>
>   The body of draw.key function contains the following
>
> pointsGrob(x=(1:key$divide-1)/(key$divide-1), y=rep(0.5,key$divide),
>             [skip]
>           )
>
> When key$divide=1, x is NaN...

There's certainly a problem (at least one of omission in the documentation), 
but I'm not sure what the best way to resolve it would be. This is what 
currently happens on S-PLUS (6.0) and R:

divide = 3:  o--o--o  S-PLUS/R
divide = 2:  o-----o  S-PLUS/R

divide = 1:     o     S-PLUS
             -------  R

The difference in the 'divide = 1' case was not intentional, I just never 
checked it. 

Possible `solutions' are:

1. keep things as they are and clarify the documentation (namely, saying that 
'divide' has to be greater than 1 to make sense)

2. change it to behave like S-PLUS (but that seems silly, since one might then 
just as well use 'points' instead of 'lines')

3. do something else entirely, like ---o--- . This is not attractive from a 
programmers point of view because it makes 'divide = 1'  behave 
inconsistently with other values of 'divide'.

I'm open to suggestions.

Deepayan