From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Thu May  1 12:20:42 2008
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 11:20:42 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] help text for xlim
In-Reply-To: <48174A40.6080701@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <481732E0.6050607@bio.ntnu.no> <48174A40.6080701@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0804291731270.6401@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

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'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
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] help text for xlim
Prof Brian Ripley