From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Tue Apr 29 18:18:08 2008
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:18:08 -0400
Subject: [Rd] help text for xlim
In-Reply-To: <481732E0.6050607@bio.ntnu.no>
References: <481732E0.6050607@bio.ntnu.no>
Message-ID: <48174A40.6080701@stats.uwo.ca>

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
>
>



[Rd] help text for xlim
Duncan Murdoch