This help topic is for R version 2.9.0. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/grid/html/viewports.html
Working with Viewports {grid}R Documentation

Maintaining and Navigating the Grid Viewport Tree

Description

Grid maintains a tree of viewports — nested drawing contexts.

These functions provide ways to add or remove viewports and to navigate amongst viewports in the tree.

Usage

pushViewport(..., recording=TRUE)
popViewport(n, recording=TRUE)
downViewport(name, strict=FALSE, recording=TRUE)
seekViewport(name, recording=TRUE)
upViewport(n, recording=TRUE)

Arguments

...

One or more objects of class "viewport".

n

An integer value indicating how many viewports to pop or navigate up. The special value 0 indicates to pop or navigate viewports right up to the root viewport.

name

A character value to identify a viewport in the tree.

strict

A boolean indicating whether the vpPath must be matched exactly.

recording

A logical value to indicate whether the viewport operation should be recorded on the Grid display list.

Details

Objects created by the viewport() function are only descriptions of a drawing context. A viewport object must be pushed onto the viewport tree before it has any effect on drawing.

The viewport tree always has a single root viewport (created by the system) which corresponds to the entire device (and default graphical parameter settings). Viewports may be added to the tree using pushViewport() and removed from the tree using popViewport().

There is only ever one current viewport, which is the current position within the viewport tree. All drawing and viewport operations are relative to the current viewport. When a viewport is pushed it becomes the current viewport. When a viewport is popped, the parent viewport becomes the current viewport. Use upViewport to navigate to the parent of the current viewport, without removing the current viewport from the viewport tree. Use downViewport to navigate to a viewport further down the viewport tree and seekViewport to navigate to a viewport anywhere else in the tree.

If a viewport is pushed and it has the same name as a viewport at the same level in the tree, then it replaces the existing viewport in the tree.

Value

downViewport returns the number of viewports it went down.

This can be useful for returning to your starting point by doing something like depth <- downViewport() then upViewport(depth).

Author(s)

Paul Murrell

See Also

viewport and vpPath.

Examples

# push the same viewport several times
grid.newpage()
vp <- viewport(width=0.5, height=0.5)
pushViewport(vp)
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="blue"))
grid.text("Quarter of the device",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="blue"))
pushViewport(vp)
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="red"))
grid.text("Quarter of the parent viewport",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="red"))
popViewport(2)
# push several viewports then navigate amongst them
grid.newpage()
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="grey"))
grid.text("Top-level viewport",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="grey"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
pushViewport(viewport(width=0.8, height=0.7, name="A"))
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="blue"))
grid.text("1. Push Viewport A",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="blue"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
pushViewport(viewport(x=0.1, width=0.3, height=0.6,
  just="left", name="B"))
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="red"))
grid.text("2. Push Viewport B (in A)",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="red"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
upViewport(1)
grid.text("3. Up from B to A",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="blue"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
pushViewport(viewport(x=0.5, width=0.4, height=0.8,
  just="left", name="C"))
grid.rect(gp=gpar(col="green"))
grid.text("4. Push Viewport C (in A)",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="green"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
pushViewport(viewport(width=0.8, height=0.6, name="D"))
grid.rect()
grid.text("5. Push Viewport D (in C)",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
upViewport(0)
grid.text("6. Up from D to top-level",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="grey"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
downViewport("D")
grid.text("7. Down from top-level to D",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "lines"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
seekViewport("B")
grid.text("8. Seek from D to B",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="red"))
pushViewport(viewport(width=0.9, height=0.5, name="A"))
grid.rect()
grid.text("9. Push Viewport A (in B)",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(1, "lines"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
seekViewport("A")
grid.text("10. Seek from B to A (in ROOT)",
  y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(3, "lines"), gp=gpar(col="blue"))
if (interactive()) Sys.sleep(1.0)
seekViewport(vpPath("B", "A"))
grid.text("11. Seek from\nA (in ROOT)\nto A (in B)")
popViewport(0)

[Package grid version 2.9.0 ]