[ top | up ]

Pie Charts

Syntax

piechart(x, labels=names(x), shadow=FALSE,
        edges=200, radius=0.8, fill=NULL, main=NULL, ...)

Arguments

x a vector of positive quantities. The values in x are displayed as the areas of pie slices.
labels a vector of character strings giving names for the slices.
shadow a logical vector indicating whether a shadow effect should be attempted for the chart. This only makes sense if the slices are filled with colors.
edges the circular outline of the pie is approximated by a polygon with this many edges.
radius the pie is drawn centered in a square box whose sides range from -1 to 1. If the character strings labeling the slices are long it may be necessary to use a smaller radius.
col a vector of colors to be used in filling the slices.
main an overall title for the plot.
... graphical parameters can be given as arguments to piechart.

Description

Pie charts are a very bad way of displaying information. The eye is good at judging linear measures and bad at judging relative areas. A bar chart or dot chart is a preferable way of displaying this type of data.

See Also

dotplot.

Examples

piechart(rep(1,24), col=rainbow(24), radius=0.9) <P> pie.sales <- c(0.12, 0.3, 0.26, 0.16, 0.04, 0.12) names(pie.sales) <- c("Blueberry", "Cherry", "Apple", "Boston Cream", "Other", "Vanilla Cream") piechart(pie.sales, col=c("purple", "violetred1", "green3", "cornsilk", "cyan", "white")) piechart(pie.sales, col=gray(seq(0.4,1.0,length=6)))