Grid

Grid is an add-on package for the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a set of graphical functions which support a great deal of flexibility in the layout of graphics. The lattice add-on package for R is based on grid.

On this page you will find package downloads for various versions of grid, information on the compatibility of different versions of grid and R, and lots of documentation for grid.

I also have a todo list which describes some of my future plans for the development of grid.

Package Downloads

The latest version is 0.7-4 and can be found here.

This version will only run on R version 1.6.0 or later. (If you have an earlier version of R, there may be earlier versions of grid that are compatible; see the table below).

This version of grid should be compatible with Lattice version 0.6-7 and later.

You could try looking for a binary version for Windows here.

For those who like to live on the bleeding edge, the latest (working) development version of grid I am working on is here (Note that this may only run on the latest development version of R).

Version Information

grid is being developed alongside the development of the core R graphics API. This means that different versions of grid will only run on certain versions of R. The following table gives a partial list of grid-R version compatibilities (click on the links to get a tar ball for the corresponding version). Because many people use grid only as support for the lattice package, known grid-lattice compatibilities are also shown.

grid version	lattice version	R version
0.5 or 0.5-1	0.4-0	1.4.*
0.6 or 0.6-1	0.5-3	1.5.*
0.7-1	0.5-6	1.6.*
0.7-4	0.6-7	1.6.* or 1.7.*

Documentation

The grid package obtained from CRAN contains only a very basic and short user's guide (to save on download size). Here are a few more documents describing how some of grid's features work.

First of all, there now exists a more in-depth overview of grid (there is also a similar overview of traditional S graphics).

There are downloadable documents on specific topics, links to more general overview articles, and a short FAQ.

If you are interested in the future development of grid, there is also a list of plans and "todo"s.

Downloadable Documents

NOTE: These documents correspond to the latest development version of grid so it is possible that there will be some differences between the statements made in these documents and what your version of grid does (especially if you have an old version of grid).

A simple example showing interactive editing of grid objects.
A slightly more complex example showing how grid objects can be shared between plots.
A simple example of the use of grid.move.to and grid.line.to.
A demonstration of the use of rotated viewports.
A thorough tutorial going through the various ways a simple scatterplot might be programmed using grid.
A discussion with examples of grid's frame objects and packing grid objects into frames.
A document discussing the difference between locations and dimensions in grid.
A short discussion on using grid to draw general-purpose diagrams.
A demonstration of various ways to draw tables using grid.
Advanced
These documents are mostly written for my own reference, but if you are pulling your hair out trying to understand what grid is doing then you might be desperate enough to try these for an answer.
- A bit of a discussion about how grid units are implemented and why they are that way.
- A discussion of the current interpretation of grid's "null" units.
- A discussion of what a graphics context means in grid.
- Some notes on parent-child relationships between grid objects.
- A discussion about how to create persistent representations of grid objects.

Links to Other Documents

The paper from a talk on grid given in the Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing can be found here. NOTE: grid was originally called "lattice", but that name was too good not to use for R's implementation of Trellis so we changed; anyway, at the time of the conference it was still lattice so you are looking for the talk titled "R Lattice Graphics".

There is also an article on grid in Volume 2/2, June 2002 of the R News newsletter. In that article, the last example cannot be run because I rather stupidly used a private data set. Here is an R script that includes the data and the grid code for that example; you should be able to simply cut-and-paste or save-and-source() this to reproduce the figure. Thanks to Wendy Wrapson and Dr Niki Harre from the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland for allowing me to make the data set available.

FAQ

Does mathematical annotation work in grid (and lattice)?
Not yet, but it will from grid version 0.7 on.
Can I use "base" graphics functions with grid (and lattice)?
The short answer is no. This is pretty much the long answer too. If you really know what you are doing, you might be able to get away with a couple of things, but currently grid and base graphics are completely separate graphics systems. There may be some effort made in the future to allow them to talk to each other to some extent, but there is no timescale on this yet.