Adding mathematical notations to R plots

I have to admit that I find the plotmath expressions in R a little fiddly to annotate plots with mathematical notation.

Apparently I am not the only one, but Stefano Meschiari did actually something about it. A few days ago his package latex2exp appeared on CRAN.

The package provides the wonderful function latex2exp that translates LaTeX code into plotmath expressions. Brillant! All I have to remember is to escape the “\” character, that is write “\\“ instead of “\”.

Below is the first example from the plotmath help file and again using latex2exp. I think this is much easier to read and write.

You find more information about latex2exp on Stefano’s web site and his GitHub repository.

Session Info

R version 3.2.1 (2015-06-18)Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)Running under: OS X 10.10.4 (Yosemite)locale:[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8attached base packages:[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base     other attached packages:[1] latex2exp_0.3.1loaded via a namespace (and not attached):[1] magrittr_1.5 tools_3.2.1 Rcpp_0.11.6 stringi_0.5-5 stringr_1.0.0