Creating and Controlling Multiple Screens on a Single Device

Description

split.screen defines a number of regions within the current device which can, to some extent, be treated as separate graphics devices. It is useful for generating multiple plots on a single device. Screens can themselves be split, allowing for quite complex arrangements of plots.

screen is used to select which screen to draw in.

erase.screen is used to clear a single screen, which it does by filling with the background colour.

close.screen removes the specified screen definition(s).

Usage

split.screen(figs, screen, erase = TRUE)
screen(n = , new = TRUE)
erase.screen(n = )
close.screen(n, all.screens = FALSE)

Arguments

Details

The first call to split.screen places R into split-screen mode. The other split-screen functions only work within this mode. While in this mode, certain other commands should be avoided (see the Warnings section below). Split-screen mode is exited by the command close.screen(all = TRUE).

If the current screen is closed, close.screen sets the current screen to be the next larger screen number if there is one, otherwise to the first available screen.

Value

split.screen returns a vector of screen numbers for the newly-created screens. With no arguments, split.screen returns a vector of valid screen numbers.
screen invisibly returns the number of the selected screen. With no arguments, screen returns the number of the current screen.
close.screen returns a vector of valid screen numbers.
screen, erase.screen, and close.screen all return FALSE if R is not in split-screen mode.

Warnings

The recommended way to use these functions is to completely draw a plot and all additions (i.e. points and lines) to the base plot, prior to selecting and plotting on another screen. The behavior associated with returning to a screen to add to an existing plot is unpredictable and may result in problems that are not readily visible.

These functions are totally incompatible with the other mechanisms for arranging plots on a device: par(mfrow), par(mfcol) and layout().

The functions are also incompatible with some plotting functions, such as coplot, which make use of these other mechanisms.

erase.screen will appear not to work if the background colour is transparent (as it is by default on most devices).

References

Chambers, J. M. and Hastie, T. J. (1992) Statistical Models in S. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

Murrell, P. (2005) R Graphics. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

See Also

par, layout, Devices, dev.*

Examples

if (interactive()) {
par(bg = "white")           # default is likely to be transparent
split.screen(c(2,1))        # split display into two screens
split.screen(c(1,3), screen = 2) # now split the bottom half into 3
screen(1) # prepare screen 1 for output
plot(10:1)
screen(4) # prepare screen 4 for output
plot(10:1)
close.screen(all = TRUE)    # exit split-screen mode

split.screen(c(2,1))        # split display into two screens
split.screen(c(1,2),2)      # split bottom half in two
plot(1:10)                  # screen 3 is active, draw plot
erase.screen()              # forgot label, erase and redraw
plot(1:10, ylab= "ylab 3")
screen(1)                   # prepare screen 1 for output
plot(1:10)
screen(4)                   # prepare screen 4 for output
plot(1:10, ylab="ylab 4")
screen(1, FALSE)            # return to screen 1, but do not clear
plot(10:1, axes=FALSE, lty=2, ylab="")  # overlay second plot
axis(4)                     # add tic marks to right-hand axis
title("Plot 1")
close.screen(all = TRUE)    # exit split-screen mode
}