grid.locator: Capture a Mouse Click

Description

Allows the user to click the mouse once within the current graphics device and returns the location of the mouse click within the current viewport, in the specified coordinate system.

Usage

grid.locator(unit = "native")

Arguments

unit

The coordinate system in which to return the location of the mouse click. See the unit function for valid coordinate systems.

Value

A unit object representing the location of the mouse click within the current viewport, in the specified coordinate system.If the user did not click mouse button 1, the function (invisibly) returns NULL.

Details

This function is modal (like the graphics package function locator) so the command line and graphics drawing is blocked until the use has clicked the mouse in the current device.

Examples

Run this code

if (interactive()) {
  ## Need to write a more sophisticated unit as.character method
  unittrim <- function(unit) {
    sub("^([0-9]+|[0-9]+[.][0-9])[0-9]*", "\\1", as.character(unit))
  }
  do.click <- function(unit) {
    click.locn <- grid.locator(unit)
    grid.segments(unit.c(click.locn$x, unit(0, "npc")),
                  unit.c(unit(0, "npc"), click.locn$y),
                  click.locn$x, click.locn$y,
                  gp=gpar(lty="dashed", col="grey"))
    grid.points(click.locn$x, click.locn$y, pch=16, size=unit(1, "mm"))
    clickx <- unittrim(click.locn$x)
    clicky <- unittrim(click.locn$y)
    grid.text(paste0("(", clickx, ", ", clicky, ")"),
              click.locn$x + unit(2, "mm"), click.locn$y,
              just="left")
  }
  do.click("inches")
  pushViewport(viewport(width=0.5, height=0.5,
                         xscale=c(0, 100), yscale=c(0, 10)))
  grid.rect()
  grid.xaxis()
  grid.yaxis()
  do.click("native")
  popViewport()
}

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