Find the margin width necessary to fit text or a legend next to a plot

Calculates the margin width necessary to fit text or a legend next to a plot.

Usage

getMarginWidth(side=4,labels,is.legend=FALSE)

Arguments

side: Which side of the plot (as in axis).
labels: The text to place next to the plot.
is.legend: Whether the text is in a legend or not.

Details

getMarginWidth reads parameters about the current plot and calculates the left or right (default) margin necessary to fit the strings passed as labels or a legend containing those strings.

Value

A two element list containing the number of margin lines necessary to fit the text or legend and the horizontal center of the margin in user units.

Author

Jim Lemon

Examples

 plot(rnorm(10))

 newmarinfo<-getMarginWidth(labels=c("Long label","Even longer label"))
#> plotprop 0.814 marprop 0.063 plotwidth 9.72 marwidth 2.861766 
 oldmar<-par("mar")
 par(mar=c(oldmar[1:3],newmarinfo$newmar))
 plot(rnorm(10))
 par(xpd=TRUE)
 text(rep(newmarinfo$marcenter,2),c(0.5,-0.5),
  c("Long label","Even longer label"))

 par(mar=oldmar,xpd=FALSE)