r - How to output a stem and leaf plot as a plot

Question

Is there a way to output a stem and leaf plot to a graphical device, such as window() / quartz()? There are at least two ways to get stem and leaf plots in R: ?stem, in the graphics package, and ?stem.leaf, in the aplpack package. Both output text to the console. For example:

> set.seed(1)
> stem(rbinom(10, size=10, prob=.5))

  The decimal point is at the |

  3 | 0
  4 | 000
  5 | 0
  6 | 00
  7 | 000

It would be nice if this could be conveniently output to a graphical device where it could be combined with other plots (say a histogram) in a multi-figure layout, and/or saved as a png file. I am aware that you can output LaTeX and compile it into a pdf (e.g., see: Stem and Leaf from R into LaTeX), but this isn't very convenient and isn't really what I'm after. Is there an R function that can do this? Is there a simple hand-coded solution?

Answer 1

Here is one simple example:

plot.new()
tmp <- capture.output(stem(iris$Petal.Length))
text( 0,1, paste(tmp, collapse='
'), adj=c(0,1), family='mono' )

If you want to overlay a histogram then you probably want to use the text function on each of the elements of tmp rather than pasteing. Functions like strheight and strwidth will be useful to find the coordinates.

There are also functions in the gplots and plotrix packages for plotting text and adding tables to plots (other functions in other packages probably exist along these lines as well).