Comments on: An Extension of Wilkinson’s Algorithm for Positioning Tick Labels on Axes

By: Justin Talbot

Justin Talbot — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:25:43 +0000

The current R version is available via CRAN or R-Forge.

By: MySchizoBuddy

MySchizoBuddy — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:06:21 +0000

Was the final version released by InfoVis?
where is the link?

By: Justin Talbot

Justin Talbot — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:57:19 +0000

You’re right that more white space would look better. This was an issue that I ran out of time and space to address correctly. Basically, it’s not sufficient to just add 4% whitespace to the resulting axis because the optimization function might have found a better solution had it known that it had more space to work in. On the other hand, you can’t just pad the white space up front, because you want the ending ticks to be close to the actual data extremes, not to the padded extremes. To address this, our coverage component should probably be split into two parts, one evaluating white space and the other evaluating closeness to the extrema. Good future work.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by the space between the first/last tick and the axis. Do you mean the space between the first and last tick and the respective end of the axis *line*? If so, that would be a good change (another adjustment to the coverage criteria) and should be easy for plots with lots of labels. However, for plots with few labels, my guess is that this would introduce a lot of extra white space.

By: Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:02:45 +0000

The R graphics don’t look quite right – they’re missing the standard 4% offset between the data and the axes.

I also wonder if you could make the ticks more aesthetically pleasing by making the space between the first/last tick and the axis more symmetric.