[R] A problem with plotting a long expression in ylab ?

Paul Murrell p.murrell at auckland.ac.nz
Wed Sep 29 01:24:09 CEST 2010


Hi

It is a bug.  A fix has been committed.

Thanks for the report!

Paul

On 29/09/2010 10:15 a.m., Ben Bolker wrote:
> Barry Rowlingson<b.rowlingson<at>  lancaster.ac.uk>  writes:
>
>>> My point is that in regular text, ylab plots it where it then goes outside
>>> the borders.
>>> With the use of expressions - the text just doesn't show up.
>>> Originally I thought it was because of my miss-use of expressions, until I
>>> figured it was the level of cex.lab I was using.
>>> The problem is that when you can't see the text, you don't have a sense of
>>> how much to decrease the cex.lab so the text will fit.
>>> I hope I was now clearer.
>>
>> Gotcha. Seems to only affect ylab though. Do this:
>>
>>   >  t =  expression(paste("test
>> loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo(% of 360" *degree,
>> ")"))
>>   >  plot(1,xlab=t,ylab=t,main=t)
>>
>> then if I shrink my graphics window I can make the ylab disappear but
>> not the xlab or title.
>>
>>   Seems to affect any rotated expressions:
>>
>>> plot(1)
>>> text(1,1,t,srt=90)
>>> text(1,1,t,srt=0)
>>> text(1,1,t,srt=45)
>>
>>   Now shrink window and watch the rotated expressions vanish! They
>> disappear when they start (or finish) out of the entire graphics
>> device, not the plot region...
>>
>>   I cant find anything relating to clipping in the help, and I am on
>> Linux, so see if there's any news about it, try it with R-patched or
>> R-devel and then report a bug after having read all the other stuff
>> about R bug reporting!
>>
>> Barry
>
>
>     I don't claim to understand it, but there is something quite
> fundamental about the properties of the X11() graphics device in R
> that makes labels that would otherwise overlap, disappear -- if
> you do 'extreme resizing' with the graphics above, you can see that
> otherwise-overlapping x- and y-axis tick labels disappear as the
> graph gets scrunched.  This is (apparently) true of X11 graphics
> on MacOS as well -- Quartz window has a different behavior.
> Trying with pdf() as well -- for height=2, width=2, only 1 y-axis
> and 2 x-axis tick labels survive, *but* the x and y labels and the
> title are all still present (but clipped, of course).
>     [Hmmm. Take my reports above with a grain of salt, I wasn't
> always using expression()s.]
>
>    So I would guess that if you reported this as a bug you would
> be told that it was a poorly documented property of R's X11
> graphics model, rather than a bug ...
>
>    I have no idea where to start looking for more information
> about what defines this behavior -- if I were desperate to know
> I would probably try asking Paul Murrell ...
>
>    I would be very interested to see this discussed on r-devel,
> if anyone bit ...
>
>     Ben Bolker
>
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-- 
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/



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