ABSTRACT
One major selling point for R is that it has better graphics capabilities than many of the commercial alternatives.Whether you want quick graphs that help you understand the structure of your data, or publication-quality graphics that accurately communicate your message to your readers, R will suffice. You can get an initial overview of R’s graphic capabilities by typing demo(graphics).
This chapter provides a deeper exposition of the graphical capabilities of R, building on the modest offering in Chapter 4. We cover the construction of simple graphics, in terms of the individual pieces that make up the default plot. We discuss the graphics parameters that are used to fine-tune individual graphs and the relationships between multiple graphics on a page. We show how to save graphical objects in various formats (pdf, postscript, etc.). Finally, we present some specific R graphical tools for the presentation of multivariate data (lattice graphs, which simplify the construction of conditioning plots) and some 3D-graphic construction tools.
