Prettified Base Graphics

Anyone who uses R Base graphics, have a 100 and 1 tweaks that they use to make the figures more presentable. This package aims to capture the tweaks in one place. By masking standard plotting functions, we can automatically make base graphics a bit more pretty.

Installation

The package is still being developed and the API is subject to change. To install the package from github, use devtools

devtools::install_github("jumpingrivers/prettyB")

The package can then be loaded in the usual way

## Warning: base function masking
library("prettyB")

Usage

All plotting functions work exactly as before, with the same inputs. The difference is that the defaults have been changed. For example, compare

op = par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
graphics::plot.default(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width)
plot(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width)

The second plot() function call is from the prettyB package.

There are currently two themes: expand (default) and minimal:

theme_set("minimal")
graphics::plot.default(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width, 
     main="Classic Iris Dataset", xlab="Length", ylab="Width")
plot(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width, 
     main="Classic Iris Dataset", xlab="Length", ylab="Width")

Other plots

The package also prettifies other functions (examples below use the minimal theme).

• barplots

  graphics::barplot.default(VADeaths, main = "Death Rates in Virginia")
  barplot(VADeaths, main = "Death Rates in Virginia")

  

• qqplots

  x = rnorm(20)
  stats:::qqnorm.default(x)
  qqnorm(x)

  

• Histograms

  z = rt(100, 2)
  graphics::hist.default(z, main="The t-distribution")
  hist(z, main="The t-distribution")

  

TODO

• Think a bit more about palettes
• Vignettes: What defaults have been changed.
• Boxplots
• Package building: Can I ignore the warnings?
• Tests