R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Using par to beautify a plot in R

One quick and easy way to edit a plot is by generating the plot in R and then using Inkspace or any other software to edit it. We can save some valuable time if we know some basic edits that can be applied on a plot by setting them in a par() function. All the available options to edit a plot can be studied in detail by typing ?par in the command window.

How to do it…

In the following code, I have highlighted some commonly used parameters:

x=c(1:10)
y=c(1:10)
par(bg = "#646989", las = 1, col.lab = "black", col.axis = "white",bty = "n",cex.axis = 0.9,cex.lab= 1.5)
plot(x,y, pch = 20, xlab = "fake x data", ylab = "fake y data")

How it works…

Under the par() function, we have set the background color using the bg = argument. ...