Skip to content

Conversation

@teunbrand
Copy link
Contributor

This PR aims to fix #426.

Briefly, it introduces two classes of palettes: <pal_continuous> and <pal_discrete>, which I mostly see as making {scales}' palettes more formal.

The classes are simply functions with attributes that provide information about the palette.
The <pal_discrete> class accepts a scalar n as input and spits out a vector of n distinct values.
The <pal_continuous> class accepts a numeric vector between (0, 1) and spits out a vector of equal length.
All existing palettes have been given appropriate classes.

The palette_type() function probes the type attribute, indicating what palettes can be used for, like "colour" or "linetype".
The palette_na_safe() function probes <pal_continuous> on whether NA are translated (e.g. in using the colour_ramp(na.colour) argument).
The palette_nlevels() function probes <pal_discrete> what the maximum n is.

The as_continuous_pal() function can cast <pal_discrete> to <pal_continuous>. For colour types, this is wrapping the discrete palette in colour_ramp().
The as_discrete_pal() function can cast <pal_continuous> to <pal_discrete>. This is mostly palette_fun(seq(0, 1, length.out = n).

A small demo:

devtools::load_all("~/packages/scales")
#> ℹ Loading scales

# Probing properties
pal <- pal_brewer("qual")
is_discrete_pal(pal)
#> [1] TRUE
palette_nlevels(pal)
#> [1] 8

# Converting from continuous to discrete
pal <- pal_gradient_n(rainbow(10))
is_continuous_pal(pal)
#> [1] TRUE
disc <- as_discrete_pal(pal)
is_discrete_pal(disc)
#> [1] TRUE
show_col(disc(9))

Created on 2024-04-16 with reprex v2.1.0

@teunbrand
Copy link
Contributor Author

@thomasp85 can I put this on your radar for review sometime?

Copy link
Member

@thomasp85 thomasp85 left a comment

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

LGTM

@thomasp85 thomasp85 merged commit 6e5e4c3 into r-lib:main Sep 13, 2024
@teunbrand teunbrand deleted the palette_description branch September 13, 2024 07:08
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

Feature request: properties for palettes

2 participants