Change the spacing of tick marks on the axis of a plot?

Question

How can I change the spacing of tick marks on the axis of a plot?

What parameters should I use with base plot or with rgl?

Answer 1

There are at least two ways for achieving this in base graph (my examples are for the x-axis, but work the same for the y-axis):

1. Use par(xaxp = c(x1, x2, n)) or plot(..., xaxp = c(x1, x2, n)) to define the position (x1 & x2) of the extreme tick marks and the number of intervals between the tick marks (n). Accordingly, n+1 is the number of tick marks drawn. (This works only if you use no logarithmic scale, for the behavior with logarithmic scales see ?par.)

2. You can suppress the drawing of the axis altogether and add the tick marks later with axis().
   To suppress the drawing of the axis use plot(... , xaxt = "n").
   Then call axis() with side, at, and labels: axis(side = 1, at = v1, labels = v2). With side referring to the side of the axis (1 = x-axis, 2 = y-axis), v1 being a vector containing the position of the ticks (e.g., c(1, 3, 5) if your axis ranges from 0 to 6 and you want three marks), and v2 a vector containing the labels for the specified tick marks (must be of same length as v1, e.g., c("group a", "group b", "group c")). See ?axis and my updated answer to a post on stats.stackexchange for an example of this method.