rk.tinyplot: Lightweight Base R Graphics for RKWard

A GUI Wrapper for the tinyplot Package Bringing Powerful Base R Graphics to RKWard

rk.tinyplot provides a seamless, point-and-click interface for creating elegant and efficient visualizations directly within RKWard. This plugin leverages the lightweight and versatile tinyplot package, allowing users to generate common plots like density charts, histograms, and boxplots for both one-dimensional and two-dimensional data without writing any R code.

🌟 Key Features

Zero-Code Base R Graphics: Generate common statistical plots directly from RKWard's GUI.
Intuitive Interface: Cleanly organized tabs for data selection, plot aesthetics, labels, themes, and output settings.
Comprehensive Customization: Control plot types (density, histogram, boxplot, scatter, line, etc.), colors, themes, axis labels, text sizes, legend positions, and more.
Tidy Data Integration: Works directly with your data frames, leveraging dplyr pipes for automatic data subsetting and cleaning.
Memory Efficient: Optimized for large datasets by processing data efficiently.
High-Quality Export: Save plots in various formats (PNG, SVG, JPG) with customizable dimensions and resolutions.
Multilingual Ready: Fully prepared for translation into English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese (Brazil).

What's New in Version 0.0.1

Initial Release: Introduces the first version of rk.tinyplot, providing a foundational GUI for common distributions and relationships plots using the tinyplot package.
Core Plotting Functions: Includes tools for density plots, histograms, boxplots, scatter plots, line plots, and more, all accessible through RKWard.
Integrated Theming & Labels: Offers extensive options for plot titles, axis labels, legend customization, and applying various visual themes (theme_minimal, theme_bw, etc.).
Flexible Output Control: Define plot dimensions, resolution, and file formats for exporting your visualizations.

⚙️ Prerequisites

You must have RKWard installed along with the following R packages. The plugin will automatically attempt to load them when required:

install.packages("tinyplot")

🚀 Installation

You can install this plugin directly from GitHub using remotes or devtools inside your RKWard console:

# Install the plugin
library("remotes")
# install_github("AlfCano/rk.tinyplot")
install.packages("rk.tinyplot", repos = c('https://alfcano.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Once installed, restart RKWard to ensure the new menu entries and translations appear correctly.

🛠️ Usage Workflow

This plugin adds two new components under the Plots > tinyplot menu in RKWard:

1. 1D Distributions

Visualize the distribution of single variables.

Data: Select your data frame and the variable(s) for the X-axis. Optionally use a grouping variable for color/fill and a facet variable for subplots.
Aesthetics: Choose plot type (Density, Histogram, Boxplot), point character, line width, and opacity.
Labels & Themes: Customize titles, axis labels (with automatic text wrapping), legend titles, and apply various visual themes (theme_minimal, theme_dark, etc.).
Output: Define plot dimensions, resolution, and choose the output device (PNG, SVG, JPG).

2. 2D Relationships

Explore relationships between two variables.

Data: Select your data frame and map variables to X, Y, Grouping (Color/Fill), and Faceting.
Aesthetics: Choose plot types (Scatter, Line, Boxplot, Violin, etc.), point character, line width, and opacity.
Labels & Themes: Customize titles, axis labels, legend position, and apply visual themes.
Output: Define plot dimensions, resolution, and choose the output device (PNG, SVG, JPG).

🌍 Internationalization (i18n)

The graphical interface automatically adapts to your RKWard language settings. Currently supported languages:

🇺🇸 English (Default)
🇪🇸 Spanish (Español)
🇫🇷 French (Français)
🇩🇪 German (Deutsch)
🇧🇷 Portuguese (Português do Brasil)

📝 License and Author

Author: Alfonso Cano (@AlfCano)
Email: alfonso.cano@correo.buap.mx

Assisted by: Gemini, a large language model from Google.
License: GPL (>= 3)

This project is licensed under the GPL (>= 3) License.