In this recipe, we will learn how to adjust the x and y limits of plots, which is useful in adjusting a graph to suit your presentation needs and adding additional data to the same plot.
We will modify our first scatter plot example to demonstrate how to adjust axes limits:
plot(cars$dist~cars$speed, xlim=c(0,30), ylim=c(0,150))
In our original scatter plot in the first recipe of this chapter, the x axis limits were set to just below 5 up to 25 and the y axis limits were set from 0 to 120. In this example, we set the x axis limits from 0 to 30 and the y axis limits to 0 to 150 using the xlim
and ylim
arguments, respectively.
Both xlim
and ylim
take a vector of length 2
as valid values in the c(minimum,maximum)
form, that is, xlim=c(0,30)
means set the x axis minimum limit to 0 and maximum limit to 30.