set: Set the Default Color Theme and Other System Settings

Description

Each graph is based on a default color theme. The original default is colors="blue", but set allows other color palettes to be set as default as well. Setting ghost=TRUE provides transparency effects against a black background. Other system settings are also available.

Usage

set(colors=c("blue", "gray", "rose", "green", "gold", "red",
        "dodgerblue", "purple", "sienna", "orange.black",
        "gray.black"),
         col.fill.bar=NULL, trans.fill.bar=NULL,
         col.fill.pt=NULL, trans.fill.pt=NULL,
         col.stroke.bar=NULL, col.stroke.pt=NULL, 
         col.bg=NULL, col.grid=NULL, col.heat=NULL, ghost=NULL,
         n.cat=getOption("n.cat"), width=120, show=FALSE)

Arguments

colors

The specified color scheme.

col.fill.bar

Color of a filled region, such as a histogram bar.

trans.fill.bar

The transparency of a filled bar or rectangular region, such as a histogram bar or the box in a box plot. Value from 0 to 1, opaque to transparent.

col.fill.pt

Color of a filled region, such as a plotted point.

trans.fill.pt

The transparency of the inner region of a plotted point. Value from 0 to 1, opaque to transparent.

col.stroke.bar

Color of the border of a filled region such as a histogram bar.

col.stroke.pt

Color of a line or outline of a filled region, such as the border of a plotted point.

col.bg

Color of the plot background.

col.grid

Color of the grid lines.

col.heat

Color of the heat map for correlation matrices.

ghost

Add a black background, transparent grid lines and transparency for the bars. Overrides individual settings for those values.

n.cat

Number of categories, which specifies the largest number of unique values of variable of a numeric data type for which the variable will be analyzed as categorical. Default is turned off, a value of 0.

width

Maximum width of each line displayed at the console, just accesses the standard R options function for width.

show

Option for showing all settings.

Details

Sets the default color palette via the R options statement, as well as the transparency of plotted bars and points. Each time colors is reset, the specific color options are reset to their default values, which includes a transparency fill for plotted points of 0.66.

The gray color scheme is based on the colors used in Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package.

Set ghost=TRUE is equivalent to setting col.bg to "black" and col.grid to "transparent" with a bar transparency of 0.7. It overrides these settings individually, so must turn ghost=FALSE and set each of the three settings individually to change from the standard ghost settings.

References

Wickham, Hadley, ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis, 2nd edition, Springer, 2009.

Examples

Run this code

# set all subsequent graphic output to gray scale
set(colors="gray")

# define a custom color theme: sienna
# this works regardless of the set color theme because
#   all of the individual components of the theme are changed
# the trans options are the default values, so not necessary to
#   set unless already changed previously
# the three ghost settings - trans.fill.bar, col.grid and col.bg --
#   must be manually entered to achieve  a ghost plot
set(col.fill.bar="seagreen3")
set(col.fill.pt="seagreen3")
set(col.stroke.bar="seagreen4")
set(col.stroke.pt="seagreen4")
set(col.bg="seashell1")
set(col.grid="seashell2")
set(trans.fill.bar=.00)
set(trans.fill.pt=.66)

# all numeric variables with 8 or less unique values are analyzed
#   as categorical variables
set(n.cat=8)