I think you're right, xlim is harder to discover than it should be. If
we added the right "concept" marker to the page, then help.search()
would find it. But a lot of things are mentioned on the plot.default
page; how many others there are just as hard as xlim to find? I'd
rather not fix xlim today, and then something else tomorrow, etc: I'd
prefer it if someone looked carefully at what the concepts are on that
page and whether it is the best place to find descriptions of them. Any
volunteers?
Duncan Murdoch
Henrik Parn wrote:
Dear R-developers,
A student asked me today of how to specify the limits of the x-axis. I
knew that he should use xlim, but I tried to encourage him to have a try
himself with the various help functions. I do not judge if he used the
correct search strategy or right key words, but anyway here is what he
tried: he looked at ?plot. There xlim is not mentioned. He checked ?par.
There you find xlim mentioned under the xaxs argument, but not how to
specify xlim itself. He also failed with help.search("x-axis limits")
and help.search("x-axis range") and dito apropos(). Neither did
Rsitesearch() for these terms leed him reasonably straight to the xlim.
Finally, he checked under See Also: plot.default, and there xlim is
mentioned as argument, but it does not appear in the examples.
I think it is fair enough that xlim does not appear under ?plot or ?par,
but would it be possible to add an explicit xlim example under
plot.default and perhaps to make xlim more likely to be hit by
'xlim-related' searches?
Best regards,
Henrik
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.7.0 (2008-04-22)
i386-pc-mingw32
locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
Kingdom.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
Kingdom.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
WinXP
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