adegraphics packageThe adegraphics package is a complete reimplementation of the graphical functionalities of the ade4 package (Dray and Dufour 2007). The package has been initially designed to improve the representation of the outputs of multivariate analyses performed with ade4 but as its graphical functionalities are very general, they can be used for other purposes.
The adegraphics package provides a flexible environment to produce, edit and manipulate graphs. We adopted an object oriented approach (a graph is an object) using S4 classes and methods and used the visualization system provided by the lattice (Sarkar 2008) and grid (Murrell 2005) packages. In adegraphics, graphs are R objects that can be edited, stored, combined, saved, removed, etc.
Note that we tried to facilitate the handling of adegraphics by ade4 users. Hence, the name of functions and parameters has been preserved in many cases. The main changes are listed in the appendix of this vignette so that it should be quite easy to use adegraphics. However, several new functionalities (graphical parameters, creation and manipulation of graphical objects, etc.) are now available and detailed in this vignette.
The adelist mailing list can be used to send questions and/or comments on adegraphics (see http://listes.univ-lyon1.fr/wws/info/adelist)
In adegraphics, a user-level function produces a plot that is stored (and returned) as an object. The class architecture of the objects created by adegraphics functions is described in Figure 1.