boxplot "names" encroaches on axis

[Earl Brown]

Rists,

I want to add a line break to each name in the "names" argument of boxplot(), but that pushes the first word up into the x-axis. I increased margin sizes with par(mar) and par(oma), but that only increases the space between the second (botton) word and the bottom of the plot, rather than creating more space between the first (top) word and the axis. Also, I tried turning off the axis and adding it myself:

boxplot(... axis = FALSE)
axis(... line = 2)

but that moves down the axis line itself too, when I only want to move the words down.

I'll attach a screenshot of what I'm seeing. (Hopefully, it will attach.)

Thanks in advance for any help. Earl Brown

[David Reitter]

On Aug 7, 2014, at 5:58 PM, Earl Brown <ekbr...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to add a line break to each name in the "names" argument of boxplot(), but that pushes the first word up into the x-axis. I increased margin sizes with par(mar) and par(oma), but that only increases the space between the second (botton) word and the bottom of the plot, rather than creating more space between the first (top) word and the axis.

I can’t tell you how to fix the specific issue elegantly. If you must, perhaps try using empty labels and the `text’ function to place labels manually.

However, I would, in this case, just leave out the redundant word “speakers”, because it does not discriminate between the three classes.

Second, as a general idea, consider using ggplot2, which creates prettier plots with more control in much nicer syntax. (After getting over the learning curve, that is.)

Best
David

[Alex Perrone]

Yeah, I couldn’t get it to work with `boxplot` either. Even when I added a “\n” before the x-axis labels, it kept creeping up towards x-axis. 

Here is a ggplot way: https://gist.github.com/boethian/4e37736abfc9a255fa5f

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[Martin Schweinberger]

Hi R-onauts,

there are more elegant ways to handle this, but this fix works fine on my machine. you can set up traditional box plots (without the ggplot2 package) by combining the argument axes = F with the axis function and the mtext function as suggested by the pervious commentators (I used the mtcars data for illustration purposes):

boxplot(mpg~cyl,data=mtcars, main="Customized Box Plot", ylab = "Duration (ms)", axes = F)
axis(1, at= 1:3, labels= c("", "", ""), lty= 1, col= "blue", las= .8)
mtext(c("English\nspeakers", "Heritage\nspeakers", "Spanish\nspeakers"), side = 1, line= 3, at = 1:3)
box()

​all the best,

martin

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Martin Schweinberger

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Home: http://www.martinschweinberger.de/blog/

[Martin Schweinberger]

sorry - forgot the tick marks and labels at the 2nd axis. here is the updated code:

boxplot(mpg~cyl,data=mtcars, main="Customized Box Plot", ylab = "Duration (ms)", ylim = c(10, 40), axes = F)

axis(1, at= 1:3, labels= c("", "", ""), lty= 1, col= "blue", las= .8)

axis(2, at= c(10, 20, 30, 40), labels= c("10", "20", "30", "40"), lty= 1, col= "blue", las= .8)

mtext(c("English\nspeakers", "Heritage\nspeakers", "Spanish\nspeakers"), side = 1, line= 3, at = 1:3)
box()

​

best

[Earl Brown]

Thanks for all the replies. I've used base R boxplot() with mtext(), as I don't yet have the control in ggplot2 that I have in base R. I'll attach the final graphic I was trying to produce, if you'd like to see it. Thanks again.