R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Changing the box styling

So far, we have used the default styling for our box plots. In this recipe, we will learn how to change the colors, widths, and styles of various elements of a box plot.

Getting ready

We will continue using the base graphics library functions, so we need not load any additional library or package. We just need to run the recipe code at the R prompt. We can also save the code as a script to use it later. Here, we will use the metals.csv example dataset again:

metals<-read.csv("metals.csv")

How to do it...

We can build a box plot with custom colors, widths, and styles in the following way:

boxplot(metals[,-1], border = "white",col = "black",boxwex = 0.3, medlwd=1, whiskcol="black",staplecol="black", outcol="red",cex=0.3,outpch=19, ...