Question

I’ve been poking around with R graphical parameters trying to make my plots look a little more professional (e.g., las=1, bty="n" usually help). Started playing with tikzDevice, which was a huge improvement in my mind. It’s amazing how much better things look when the font sizes and styles in the figure match those of the surrounding document.

I would like to add several effects to my plots and am interested in methods of doing so in a reproducible fashion. I realize that these might be considered “chart junk,” but I find that in my field adding them is helpful to have output be considered professional.

Specifically, I would like to produce any or all of the following effects:

1. Gradient shading
   
2. Rounded corners
   
3. Shadow effects

Code, references to appropriate packages, or outlines of strategies for accomplishing these effects would be helpful. Thank you.

Answer 1

You can make shadow lines by drawing several lines at an offset from the line generating the shadow. Start with a wide line (lwd=30, say) drawn in a pale grey (gray(1)) and then draw thinner lines coloured down to gray(.5). There’s one shadow.

package:grid has a function for rounded rectangles. Or you can draw them in base graphics using segment and line and a bit of ancient greek geometry.

Psychedelic backgrounds can be splatted onto a base graphics canvas using ‘image’. Generate the image using the ‘raster’ package in whatever resolution you like.

You could also use a package called something like RGoogleVis to interface with Google’s charting, or export to JSON, and use something like D3 to do enterprise interactive graphics:

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/

Or just load the darn data into Excel already.