ABSTRACT
High-level graphics functions generate a complete plot from a description that says what to plot, without elaborate instructions about how. For looking at data, particularly at an exploratory stage, this is what people want: to get a picture with a minimum of effort, and then to get on with the process of learning from that picture. This chapter presents the information that a person needs in order to be able to exert precise control over the graphics produced by S language. The margins surrounding the plot are used for tick labels, axis labels, titles, and other annotations. Locations within the margins are specified by a margin coordinate system. The function par maintains a set of named graphical parameters, as part of the graphics state. A hidden object contains the parameters throughout an S session. A few high-level functions, notably tsplot and matplot, produce several lines or sets of points and hence take as arguments vectors of graphical parameters.
