Question

Does R have color palettes?

In other words, I am looking for an array of 6 or so color names that go well together in a graph or plot; maybe there are some predefined schemes like that?

Answer 1

The easiest way to generate a palette is using generic functions from the basic grDevices package:

rainbow()
topo.colors()
terrain.colors()
heat.colors()

These are useful if the desired number of colors doesn’t exceed 7-8. The only necessary argument is the number of colors in palette.

There is also gray() function which can be used to generate various schades of gray.

Or you could do something like:

pal <- colorRampPalette(c("red", "blue", "plum"))
barplot(t(as.matrix(mydf)), beside=TRUE, col=pal(3))