Control box type with the bty option



The bty option of the par() function allows to control the box style of base R charts. This post provides a few examples illustrating how this option works.

Boxplot Section Boxplot pitfalls

The bty option of the par() function allows to custom the box around the plot.

Several letters are possible. Shape of the letter represents the boundaries:

  • o: complete box (default parameter),
  • n: no box
  • 7: top + right
  • L: bottom + left
  • C: top + left + bottom
  • U: left + bottom + right

# Cut the screen in 4 parts
par(mfrow=c(2,2))
 
#Create data
a=seq(1,29)+4*runif(29,0.4)
b=seq(1,29)^2+runif(29,0.98)
 
# First graph
par(bty="l")
boxplot(a , col="#69b3a2" , xlab="bottom & left box")
# Second
par(bty="o")
boxplot(b , col="#69b3a2" , xlab="complete box", horizontal=TRUE)
# Third
par(bty="c")
boxplot(a , col="#69b3a2" , xlab="up & bottom & left box", width=0.5)
# Fourth
par(bty="n")
boxplot(a , col="#69b3a2" , xlab="no box")

Related chart types


Violin
Density
Histogram
Boxplot
Ridgeline



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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