Author: Johan Larsson
Date: 2025-07-27

# The tactile theme

### tactile

#### Johan Larsson

#### 2025-07-27

tactile introduces a new theme for latice that does a few things, namely

- minimizes paddings around the plot,
- halves axis tick lengths,
- uses a color theme based on RColorBrewer,
- decreases title size slightly,
- Sets strip backgrounds to grey.

We now turn to illustrating the differences. First, we use `lattice::show.settings()` for an overview over the default settings.

    library(tactile)
    show.settings()
    show.settings(tactile.theme())

Then we plot a sample plot (from http://latticeextra.r-forge.r-project.org/).

    set.seed(0)

    ## create a plot to demonstrate graphical settings
    obj <- xyplot(
      Sepal.Length + Sepal.Width ~ Petal.Length + Petal.Width,
      iris,
      type = c("p", "r"),
      jitter.x = TRUE,
      jitter.y = TRUE,
      factor = 5,
      auto.key = list(lines = TRUE, rectangles = TRUE, space = "top")
    )

    obj <- update(
      obj,
      legend = list(
        right = list(
          fun = "draw.colorkey",
          args = list(list(at = 0:100))
        )
      )
    )

    ## draw with default theme
    obj

    ## draw with tactile.theme()
    update(obj, par.settings = tactile.theme())