This document provides some general information on graphics in R. Generally speaking, R lets you quickly draw exploratory and diagnostic charts and with a bit of effort publication quality graphics.

R offers several quite different types of graphical functions.:

• Simple statistical graphics, like histograms, dotplots and boxplots.
• Elementary functions ("low level functions") letting you
  • modify the current chart by adding a title, a line or other objects..
  • create your own chart type by programming it.
• Trellis graphs (package lattice) producing multipanel plots by simply calling a function.
• The ggplot package that produces high quality graphics of any kind, based on Wilkinson's grammar of graphics.
• Charts using some outside resource, R providing the data.
  • The googleVis package produces google motion charts with r (have a look at demo(googleVis)
  • Interesting developments with package shiny (requires Rstudio.
  • plotly a website and technology for producing and sharing charts on the Internet

The par() function lets you define different default values for graphics and modify graph production, for instance you can change the colour of a particular element, change default fonts and their size, numerical formats and so on..