Imp (named after the small demons of Discworld widely utilized as painters in iconographs) is yet another graphics package for R.
The tessella package provides a bare-bones low-level graphics API.
This package (imp) implements a high-level front-end using tessella,
with yplot() as the primary user-level function. For those familiar
with lattice, the imp.lattice package provides wrappers to
yplot() with the same names, and at least superficially similar
interfaces, as lattice high-level functions.
install.packages("devtools")
library("devtools")
install_github("deepayan/tessella/tessella")
install_github("deepayan/yagpack/imp")
install_github("deepayan/yagpack/imp.lattice")
For a backend that does not utilise standard R graphics, you could also install
install_github("ggobi/qtbase")
install_github("ggobi/qtpaint")
install_github("ggobi/qtutils")
install_github("deepayan/tessella/quilt")
But this will require a little work (installing cmake and Qt >= 5.2.0) on Mac/Linux, and is rather more difficult on Windows.
As an API with multiple backend implementations, the point of
tessella is to cleanly separate the graphics API and rendering
backends, and thus to serve as a "code once, run anywhere" target for
graphics programmers. The goal of the imp family of packages is to
provide a high-level framework for both static and dynamic graphics by
building on tessella. R graphics devices provide a tested and
powerful cross-platform solution for static graphics, that can be
leveraged for publication quality static graphics. Dynamic and
interactive graphs usually need faster, if less polished, backends, as
well as a support framework to enable useful interactions (e.g., a
model-view-control type scheme to enable linked displays) and a
transparent way to handle mouse/keyboard events in a
backend-independent way. We hope to provide such tools, preferably by
leveraging existing packages like
plumbr and
objectSignals.
The static graphics API is in useable shape, although much work still needs to be done.
The dynamic graphics API is in the planning stages.