[R] metafor package

[S Ellison]

> -----Original Message-----
> I must apologize for the 'hack-job of a function' called forest() in metafor. 
Well, certainly no apology needed there!

> I realized a while ago that people would prefer more fine-grained control over
> the various elements of the plot (this has come up a few times before). 
Ploting functions should ideally never have hard-coded defaults. 
Having said that, it's an absolute pain to do anything else.

I've tinkered a fair bit with the problem in my own package, which for at least some plots tries to match graphical arguments in ... with those applicable to specific plotting functions so as to avoid the frequent 'duplicate parameters' or 'xxx is not a recognised parameter in <some_plotting_function>'

Another useful approach I've toyed with is to allow a list like this.special.line.pars=list(lwd=2, col=3, lty=2) to be provided, and then use do.call with functions like line, axis etc. That avoids a plot function full of things like like this.special.line.lwd, like this.special.line.col, like this.special.line.lty 

But there's no really simple answer; at some point we have to give up and point out that if saomeone really wants that much control, they can always hack the code!

S Ellison


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