From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Thu May  1 12:42:52 2008
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 06:42:52 -0400
Subject: [Rd] help text for xlim
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0804291731270.6401@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
References: <481732E0.6050607@bio.ntnu.no> <48174A40.6080701@stats.uwo.ca>
	<alpine.LFD.1.10.0804291731270.6401@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <48199EAC.6040005@stats.uwo.ca>

On 01/05/2008 6:20 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> xlim belongs to plot.window(), which is what plot.default() passes it to.
> It is documented in both places.  It is not necessarily relevant to a 
> general plot() (which might call lattice, for example).

I'll add a couple of concept entries to plot.window.

Duncan Murdoch
> 
> I'd suggest adding an alias or concept to plot.window.Rd.  And 'asp' does 
> have an alias and concept on that page.
> 
> On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>



[Rd] help text for xlim
Duncan Murdoch