Manual breaks

[vincentarelbundock]

The scales package includes convenient break_*() functions to manually specify the breaks on axes.

What is the current recommended way to manually specify breaks for ticks? Would it be easy to add support for functions that compute breaks automatically?

https://scales.r-lib.org/reference/index.html#axis-breaks

[grantmcdermott]

Yeah, we don't have a great interface for this ATM (unless I'm forgetting something). I think the best we have right now is something like:

tinyplot(1:10, xaxt = 'n', frame = TRUE)
tinyplot:::tinyAxis(side = 1, at = c(1, 4, 7, 10), labeller = 'dollar')

How best to "automate" this behaviour is something we'll need to think about. Do we add xaxb/yaxb arguments? Or. do we somehow role this functionality into xaxl/yaxl (e.g., maybe if an at argument is detected)?

[vincentarelbundock]

Circling back to this, I kind of feel like the solution you propose at the end might be a nice way to compartmentalize. This is already the recommended strategy in base R, so would feel natural to users.

All we'd need to do is expose tinyAxis to the user (probably all lower case: tinyaxis). Then, that gives us a natural place to add more arguments if we find other things to customize for axes.

What do you think? I can make a PR to export and rename tinyAxis if you like this.

[grantmcdermott]

I'm not opposed to exporting tinyAxis (although would probably keep capitalization since we pass to Axis internally).

But I'd prefer if we could support breaks directly, since one of the design themes of tinyplot is enabling full functionality in a single function call... at least as much as possible. We would only need to settle on the argument name; passing it on to tinyAxis thereafter would be straightforward.

What about xat or xaxb etc.? If you have strong opinions, I'd welcome a PR along those lines.

[vincentarelbundock]

That sounds good. Let's go with new arguments then. I think probably xaxb since the other similar arguments have four letters.

I'll try to look at this soon.

[grantmcdermott]

FYI I plan to take a stab at this tonight.