How can I find all R packages that include graphics functions?

I always have difficulty in finding all available alternative ways to produce a specific graph, either one that I have already decided to use (looking for different variations) or one that I have not yet thought of.

The R Graphical Manual site provides a complete list of samples of R's graphics functions, however it's easier for me to search providing a package n开发者_如何学Goame (how else -for example- can I get a resultset including superbarplot function, when I want to look for barplots?. Let alone that the superbarplot graph does not appear in the results even if I try searching for it's package: UsingR)

The R-SAS-SPSS Add-on Module Comparison - and especially on topic Graphics, Static in the table provided - gave me the idea that it would be nice to have a place where all relevant packages are listed by topic.

Do you have any idea about something like that?

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If you're interested in learning about all the possible graphics you can make, you should learn about the grammar of graphics, and (my) implementation of it in R: ggplot2.

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Your question, or the general pattern anyway, was clearly a primary use case for the design of the sos package.

sos actually goes one step further that your question requires by identifying particular functions with packages; in addition, it ranks the results by relevance (by default, you can change the default behavior via the "sortby" parameter, e.g., sortby="Date")

Here's how it works:

most of this package's functionality is exposed via the "findFn" command

for instance, if you want a list of all functions and the parent package related to scatter plots:

findFn("scatter plot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

This returns a dataframe formatted as HTML table and delivered in your default browser (if you don't want it to pop-up immediately, then just bind the function call to a variable and then call the variable when you're ready)

The right-most column of the dataframe/HTML page is "Description and Link". Clicking an entry in that column opens another tab in your browser (according to the user-set preferences set in your browser) with the complete R help page for that function.

The results from the function call above show, for instance, that the functions for plotting data in a 'scatter plot' format are found in the following packages:

• ade4 (function: scatter)
• IDPmisc (functions: ipairs, iplots)
• GGally (function: ggally_points)
• PerformanceAnalytics (function: chart.Scatter)
• mclust (function: clPairs)

Another example:

findFn("boxplot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

identifies these (among others) packages/functions for plotting boxplots:

• sfsmisc (function: boxplot.matrix)
• aplpack (function: boxplot2D)
• NADA (function: boxplot-methods)
• StatDA (function: rg.boxplot)
• plotrix (function: gap.boxplot)
• gplots (function: boxplot.n)
• multcompView (function: multcompBoxplot)
• oligo (function: boxplot)

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Have you seen the R Graph Gallery ?

Other than that, you may have to index all the source code of CRAN packages to search efficiently...

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these are good memory-joggers. I second the ggplot2 recommend, also recommend looking thru CRAN views:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

http://cran.fhcrc.org/web/views/Graphics.html

(this mirror seems faster in west coast US)

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http://dataspora.com/archive/2009/seminar/Survey_of_R_Graphics_by_Driscoll_Dataspora_Jun2009.pdf

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http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/04.html

(possibly world's longest webpage)

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/lectures.html

Ihaka's lectures notes