[R] A very basic line-plot question

[Phil Spector]

The reason that it's easy to produce dotcharts or barplots in R with
data like yours, and difficult to produce a line plot, is because 
dotcharts and barplots are appropriate for your data, whereas a line
plot is not.  Since the values on the x-axis represent names,
and those names are not measured on any kind of ordinal scale,
connecting the points on a plot would be at best meaningless and at 
worst deceptive.

Of course, one of R's charms is that it provides ample rope to hang
yourself it that's what you really want to do.  You could create a 
line plot with a custom axis labeled in what ever way you want, to 
produce a whatever sort of plot you wanted.  I'll leave it to you to 
figure out the details.
 					- Phil Spector
 					 Statistical Computing Facility
 					 Department of Statistics
 					 UC Berkeley
 					 spector at stat.berkeley.edu


On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, world peace wrote:

> Hi All
>
> I have data like this
>
>              tom   randy mike dan doug
> height       150   152     155  134 141
>
> I am trying to create a line plot, with names on X-axis and height measure
> on Y. how can i get it through R.
> I could get several versions which are close (dotchart, bargraph), but not
> quite the same thing.
>
> I am looking for something like
> http://www.statsoft.com/Portals/0/blog/line_plot.jpg
> with option to add more lines, such as weight measurement for above data.
>
> Thanks,
> A
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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