> From: Thomas Lumley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Liaw, Andy wrote: > > > Can some one explain why barplot() uses changing colors in > the bars by > > default? I should think that most of the time when people > draw barplots, > > they want the bars to be in the same color. (At least > that's what I'd > > expect. The first time I used barplot() in R, I was > shocked to see the > > colors.) As an example, one example in ?layout draws a > scatterplot with > > histograms drawn on the margins. The histograms were drawn > by barplot(), > > and, IMHO, look rather hideous in the colors. > > The changing colours are useful when the data are a matrix > (so that you > have bars either stacked or in groups). You can easily get a single > color, > eg > data(VADeaths) > barplot(VADeaths, beside=TRUE, col="thistle")
In that case, couldn't the code check whether the input is a matrix, and only use the changing colors if it is, and use only one color if the input is a vector (w/o dimensions)? Getting all bars to have the same color is easy. My gripe is that it's not the default, which surprised me. In the danger of taking this a bit off-topic, are there any "guidelines" on what aspect of R should and should not be compatible with Splus? barplot() in Splus does not use varying colors for the bars by default. Meanwhile, lattice uses the gray background / light blue foreground theme from Trellis as default, for the supposed compatibility with Splus. Personally I hated that color-scheme (because of my poor eye-sight and colorblind), but thought that compatibility with S is a rather weak reason there... OK, I guess enough venting for the day... Cheers, Andy [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
