Showing posts with label ggplot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ggplot. Show all posts
Thursday, April 30, 2015
LaTeX, Word, ggplot, and n00b-ness
I've been forcing myself to learn enough R and ggplot to make nice looking plots. It's taking me painfully long to learn to do even the most basic things, and +Carlos Scheidegger has been a big help !
What makes learning ggplot hard is grasping its underlying design philosophy. There's a notion of layers in a plot that I'm still getting used to. Once you get the hang of it it's quite elegant, and makes modifying plots very easy -- once you get the hang of it.
All of which makes me a little more sympathetic to people who struggle with using LaTeX. LaTeX has many of the same unnatural design principles, starting with the lack of a WYSIWIG interface (and no, LyX doesn't really count). It's an incredibly powerful interface (like ggplot), but it's darned hard to do simple things.
In fact, I've been wishing for a "Word equivalent" for ggplot2. Just like overleaf.com is now trying to make LaTeX easier for the general public, I would love to see some kind of interactive interface to ggplot2 that can generate the code automatically for standard tasks.
What makes learning ggplot hard is grasping its underlying design philosophy. There's a notion of layers in a plot that I'm still getting used to. Once you get the hang of it it's quite elegant, and makes modifying plots very easy -- once you get the hang of it.
All of which makes me a little more sympathetic to people who struggle with using LaTeX. LaTeX has many of the same unnatural design principles, starting with the lack of a WYSIWIG interface (and no, LyX doesn't really count). It's an incredibly powerful interface (like ggplot), but it's darned hard to do simple things.
In fact, I've been wishing for a "Word equivalent" for ggplot2. Just like overleaf.com is now trying to make LaTeX easier for the general public, I would love to see some kind of interactive interface to ggplot2 that can generate the code automatically for standard tasks.
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