[R] Strip location and grid colour in Lattice

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Wednesday 04 June 2003 04:26, Mulholland, Tom wrote:
> I am probably missing something quite obvious, but any help would be
> appreciated. I am continually getting people misreading the lattice plots
> because they are expecting the strip (with the factor names in them) to be
> below the graph. Is there anyway of achieving this.

No. (At least none that is easy.)

> Secondly, from a more personal note I find the grid formed by the axes to
> be a bit overpowering and would like to make it a little less bold by
> changing it to a grey of some kind. I can't see that the scales options
> have anythig in their that I could use. I can change the label colours and
> tick marks, but then I draw a blank.

It's not very clear to me what you want. If you want to change the colors, 
that should be doable. What exactly is the problem ? Do you want something 
more ?

> While I'm on a role, I find that quite often I have to resort to the at and
> label sections of the scales function to get my tickmarks looking OK. This
> seems to be when  am producing line graphs with one of the scales being a
> date (POSIXct). What is not clear to me is if all POSIXct variables are the
> same. The xyplot doco indicates that the at co-ordinates should be native
> co-ordinates. Can anyone point me to where in the voluminous documentation
> one looks to understand what this means. I have found that on some
> occasions the co-ordinates are in seconds (as the documentation on POSIXct
> states, but this afternoon I found that the values seemed to be in years.
> Which wasn't a problem other than I wish I could understand what was
> actually happening.

AFAIK, all POSIXct variables should be the 'same', as you say, being the 
number of seconds since the epoch. They have a particular class, but 
otherwise they are no different from numeric variables.

Older versions of lattice treated these as numeric (which usually were very 
very large values), and hence put horrible labels. Recent versions try to do 
something decent when they identify POSIXct variables, but they are not very 
good at it. So you _will_ need to adjust them by hand most of the time. 
Hopefully things would improve in the future. 

I'm not familiar enough with these things to understand your year problem, 
though.

Deepayan