Updated version of 0.9.0 transition guide

[Dennis Murphy]

Greetings:

A revised version of the ggplot2-0.9.0 transition guide is attached to
this mail. There are two pdf files: one in color and the other that is
B/W printer friendly. Thanks to all who commented on earlier drafts of
the document - the comments were valuable, and many were incorporated
in the revision. I hope you find it useful. Special thanks to Yihui
Xie for answering many basic questions about the knitr package, which
was used to produce this document.

The source code of the files that produced these pdfs is found at GitHub:
https://github.com/djmurphy420/ggplot2-transition-guide

Comments welcome.

Dennis

[Brian Danielak]

Dennis,

First, I want to say thanks for the fantastic work you've put into this transition guide. It really nicely outlines some of the core new features of the package, and I appreciate everyone's contributions to it.

I have a suggestion about your section on "guides(): include a table of the arguments guides() can take. As a newcomer to ggplot2 0.9.0, I'm unfamiliar with all of the options one can pass to guides. A really helpful addition to your transition guide would be a table that outlines all of the parameters one could pass to guides(). I might take Hadley's web-based documentation for the Aesthetics section of common geoms as a starting point.

I raise this issue for three reasons:

1. From the transition guide itself it's not clear what the total set of options are that one could pass to guides
2. The help file for guides() within R doesn't provide a comprehensive set of options either, nor does it have a "see also" link to any page that might.
3. Combining 1 and 2, how are new users going to learn all of the arguments that guides() takes? That's the problem I'm having: no reference that I know of contains them all.

Again, I think the ggplot2 transition guide you've created is really a great and helpful document. I'm just hoping we can extend it (and ggplot2's in-R documentation) to make clear what guides() can do.

- B

[Dennis Murphy]

Hi Brian:

Thanks for the comments. The full list of arguments is found in the
guide_legend and guide_colorbar help pages in ggplot2-0.9.0, along
with a pretty comprehensive set of basic examples that Kohske devised,
but I see your point. I'll try to come up with a table or two that
organize the arguments for the two functions.

Dennis

[Brian Danielak]

Dennis,

I'll see if there's a way I might be able to help you make that table. In the meantime, I've issued a code pull request that should link the help page for `guides` to the help pages you mentioned that actually document the arguments:

https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/pull/387

For some reason they weren't all cross-referenced to each other. Thanks again for all of your hard work!

- Brian