CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rcolors
BenDundee
BenDundee

Reputation: 4521

Add custom colors to R: Where is the color config file?

I have a few colors (rgb/hex codes) that I would like to be available as defaults. I would like for the colors to be available on startup, without having to run any scripts. In other words, I would like to run the command colors() and have my custom colors show up in the list.

I suspect this list is populated from some file in the R tree, or from some other config file somewhere else. Specifically:

Relevant data:

> version
               _                            
platform       x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0     
arch           x86_64                       
os             darwin9.8.0                  
system         x86_64, darwin9.8.0          
status                                      
major          2                            
minor          15.1                         
year           2012                         
month          06                           
day            22                           
svn rev        59600                        
language       R                            
version.string R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
nickname       Roasted Marshmallows

Upvotes: 1

Views: 521

Answers (2)

Josh O'Brien
Josh O'Brien

Reputation: 162321

To directly answer your bulleted question: R's color database is stored in the "colors.c" source file.

Because colors() etc. access compiled versions of that database, you can't add to the named colors without editing the source code and then recompiling R.

Here are the first few lines defining the ColorDataBase in $R_SOURCE_HOME/src/main/colors.c:

static ColorDataBaseEntry ColorDataBase[] = {
    /* name rgb code -- filled in by InitColors() */
    {"white",   "#FFFFFF",  0},
    {"aliceblue",   "#F0F8FF",  0},
    {"antiquewhite",    "#FAEBD7",  0},
    {"antiquewhite1",   "#FFEFDB",  0},
    {"antiquewhite2",   "#EEDFCC",  0},

Upvotes: 0

csgillespie
csgillespie

Reputation: 60462

You can (if you really want), change the default palette to your own colours. For example,

(palette(c("yellow", "orange")))
plot(1:10, col=1:10)

Rather than providing named colours, you could also specify rgb colours using the rgb function. You can add this command to your .Rprofile so it's available on start-up.

However, a better idea would be to define your own palette:

#Put this in your .Rprofile
mycols = adjustcolor(palette(), alpha.f = 0.3)
palette(mycols)

That way you don't over-ride the default. See ?palette for other examples.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions