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Graphical facilities are an important and extremely versatile component of the R environment. It is possible to use the facilities to display a wide variety of statistical graphs and also to build entirely new types of graph.

The graphics facilities can be used in both interactive and batch modes, but in most cases, interactive use is more productive. Interactive use is also easy because at startup time R initiates a graphics device driver which opens a special graphics window for the display of interactive graphics. Although this is done automatically, it is useful to know that the command used is X11() under UNIX, windows() under Windows and quartz() under Mac OS X.

Once the device driver is running, R plotting commands can be used to produce a variety of graphical displays and to create entirely new kinds of display.

Plotting commands are divided into three basic groups:

• High-level plotting functions create a new plot on the graphics device, possibly with axes, labels, titles and so on.
• Low-level plotting functions add more information to an existing plot, such as extra points, lines and labels.
• Interactive graphics functions allow you interactively add information to, or extract information from, an existing plot, using a pointing device such as a mouse.

In addition, R maintains a list of graphical parameters which can be manipulated to customize your plots.

This tutorial only describes what are known as ‘base’ graphics. A separate graphics sub-system in package grid coexists with base – it is more powerful but harder to use. There is a recommended package lattice which builds on grid and provides ways to produce multi-panel plots akin to those in the Trellis system in S.

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