Italics in title of Lattice graph

Question

I have read the posts on how to create italicized words in a graph title, but it does not seem to be working for me.

#create a list of species
sp <- c(\"E         


        

Answer 1

There argument you are passing to main needs a couple of changes.

• To use R's plotmath specials (i.e. things like italic()), it should be an expression object rather than a character string. That means doing something like this:

  main = expression(paste("Length-Freq of", italic("E. coruscans"), "by Gear"))
  

  instead of this:

  main = paste("Length-Freq of", italic("E. coruscans"), "by Gear")
  

• In addition, you are wanting to italicize i's value rather than its name, but if you just type italic(i), lattice will render i's name as a little italic "i" for each species. Use bquote() or substitute() to substitute in i's value instead, as demonstrated here:

  i <- "E. coruscans"
  xyplot(1:10~1:10,
      main = substitute(expr = expression(paste("Species name: ", italic(i))), 
                        env = list(i=i)))