Alex Rivera | Logout

Do not want scientific notation on plot axis

Asked 2011-05-11T10:53:54.657
86

I regularly do all kinds of scatter plots in R using the plot command.

Sometimes both, sometimes only one of the plot axes is labelled in scientific notation. I do not understand when R makes the decision to switch to scientific notation. Surprisingly, it often prints numbers which no sane human would write in scientific notation when labelling a plot, for example it labels 5 as 5e+00. Let's say you have a log-axis going up to 1000, scientific notation is unjustified with such "small" numbers.

I would like to suppress that behaviour, I always want R to display integer values. Is this possible?

I tried options(scipen=10) but then it starts writing 5.0 instead of 5, while on the other axis 5 is still 5 etc. How can I have pure integer values in my R plots?

I am using R 2.12.1 on Windows 7.

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2 Answers

16

You can use the axis() command for that, eg :

x <- 1:100000
y <- 1:100000
marks <- c(0,20000,40000,60000,80000,100000)
plot(x,y,log="x",yaxt="n",type="l")
axis(2,at=marks,labels=marks)

gives :

enter image description here

EDIT : if you want to have all of them in the same format, you can use the solution of @Richie to get them :

x <- 1:100000
y <- 1:100000
format(y,scientific=FALSE)
plot(x,y,log="x",yaxt="n",type="l")
axis(2,at=marks,labels=format(marks,scientific=FALSE))
answered 2011-05-11T11:14:18.947
14

Try this. I purposely broke out various parts so you can move things around.

library(sfsmisc)

#Generate the data
x <- 1:100000
y <- 1:100000

#Setup the plot area
par(pty="m", plt=c(0.1, 1, 0.1, 1), omd=c(0.1,0.9,0.1,0.9))

#Plot a blank graph without completing the x or y axis
plot(x, y, type = "n", xaxt = "n", yaxt="n", xlab="", ylab="", log = "x", col="blue")
mtext(side=3, text="Test Plot", line=1.2, cex=1.5)

#Complete the x axis
eaxis(1, padj=-0.5, cex.axis=0.8)
mtext(side=1, text="x", line=2.5)

#Complete the y axis and add the grid
aty <- seq(par("yaxp")[1], par("yaxp")[2], (par("yaxp")[2] - par("yaxp")[1])/par("yaxp")[3])
axis(2, at=aty, labels=format(aty, scientific=FALSE), hadj=0.9, cex.axis=0.8, las=2)
mtext(side=2, text="y", line=4.5)
grid()

#Add the line last so it will be on top of the grid
lines(x, y, col="blue")

enter image description here

answered 2011-05-11T17:23:58.137

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