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28 changes: 28 additions & 0 deletions vignettes/Psychoco2026/abstract.md
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tinyplot: Lightweight Extension of the Base R Graphics System

Grant McDermott, Vincent Arel-Bundock, Achim Zeileis

The base R graphics system provides a lot of powerful infrastructure for drawing
data visualizations. At the core is the `plot()` generic function with its
default and formula methods. The default method can handle many basic plotting
elements (points, lines, etc.) and the formula method flexibly handles various
`y ~ x` setups including scatterplots (numeric `y` vs. numeric `x`), boxplots
(numeric `y` vs. categorical `x`), and spineplots/spinograms (categorical `y`).
Moreover, there are many elements that can be added like legends, axes,
annotation, grids of displays, etc.

However, based on this powerful infrastructure base R provides only rather
limited convenience features such as those pioneered by newer (`grid`-based)
visualization packages like `ggplot2` and `lattice`, e.g., grouped plots with
automatic legends and/or facets, advanced visualization types, and easy
customization via ready-made themes.

The `tinyplot` package fills this gap by providing a lightweight extension of
the base R graphics system. It aims to preserve the strengths of the base R
infrastructure (including the formula-based interface) while adding the
convenience features above without requiring (strong) non-base dependencies.
The presentation provides an introduction to `tinyplot` using various
visualization examples, highlighting strengths and weaknesses compared to other
packages. The package is available from CRAN
(<https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.tinyplot>) and has many more galleries
and tutorials at <https://grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/>.