Labelling a graph in R

El Siglo

(Mods, move to another thread if necessary)

Folks,

I'm using the R program to graph my results, just a quick question;
how do I label one of my axes with a label that needs to be in superscript?

I've attached an example of a graph (here's a link to the website: http://flic.kr/p/8vNdBS). I just want to know how do I make the "13" into superscript.

Cheers in advance!:D

bnt

Have you tried the LaTeX method - putting ^{superscripted text} ? I'll have a go at this later, see if it works.

El Siglo

bnt wrote: »

Have you tried the LaTeX method - putting ^{superscripted text} ? I'll have a go at this later, see if it works.

No, I don't know how to use LaTeX and I've a week left to hand in a draft so I don't have much time to go on at the moment. I know there's a way of doing it in R but I can't seem to get the commands to work (I think it's something like "delta^13 but that doesn't seem to work either).

bnt

I wasn't suggesting you learn LaTeX, just that you try that syntax: ^{whatever}. A "hat" followed by the text to be superscripted in curly brackets. Though I don't know R, I know that these open source tools tend to hand some tasks off to other programs, rather than try to do it all themselves.

According to this, it should be enough to put in a "hat" ^ to superscript a single number e.g,

ylab = expression(paste("Area (", cm^2, ")", sep = ""))

bnt

OK, I've done a little testing, using Wikipedia and that forum message as a guide, and this code works:

x <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6)
y <- x^2 
print(y)
# plot(x, y, type = "l", xlab = "x", ylab = "Area (cm^2)")
plot(x, y, type = "l", xlab = "side (cm)", ylab = expression(paste("Area (", cm^2, ")", sep = "")))
title("Ratio of square sides to area")

I put that code in test.r and ran it using R <test.r --no-restore --save
The output goes to the default file (Rplots.pdf)

The second-last line I've commented out is an example of what doesn't work, since the "^" is inside the quotes and gets printed verbatim. So you have to use "expression" to get it evaluated, it seems.

This is the first time I've tried R, since it looked too complicated for me, and I've been using Gnuplot for simple graphs. But this example is no harder than Gnuplot, so I think I'll try R next time.

El Siglo

One of my lecturers got back to me on it, this is what he does;

plot(0,0,xlab=expression({delta}^15*N~'\50\211\51'))

That's a pretty mad looking command!:pac: