R：增加多个箱形图之间的空间，以避免遗漏x轴标签

Question

Let's say I generate 5 sets of random data and want to visualize them using boxplots and save those to a file "boxplots.png". Using the code

    png("boxplots.png")
    data <- matrix(rnorm(25),5,5)
    boxplot(data, names = c("Name1","Name2","Name3","Name4","Name5"))
    dev.off()

there are 5 boxplots created as desired in "boxplots.png", however the names for the second ("Name2") and the fourth ("Name4") boxplot are omitted. Even changing the window of my png-view makes no difference. How can I avoid this behavior?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Your offered code does not produce an overlap in my setting, but that point is relatively moot: you want a way to allow more space between words. One (brute-force-ish) way to fix the symptom is to alternate putting them on separate lines:

set.seed(42)
data <- matrix(rnorm(25),5,5)
nms <- c("Name1","Name2","Name3","Name4","Name5")
oddnums <- which(seq_along(nms) %% 2 == 0)
evennums <- which(seq_along(nms) %% 2 == 1)

(There's got to be a better way to do that, but it works.)

From here:

png("boxplot.png", height = 240)
boxplot(data, names = FALSE)
mtext(nms[oddnums], side = 1, line = 2, at = oddnums)
mtext(nms[evennums], side = 1, line = 1, at = evennums)
dev.off()

(The use of png is not important here, I just used it because of your edit.)