creating empty plot

[joachimdahl]

I am generating sparsity plots as

plot(x=[1:10;],y=[1:10;],Guide.xticks(ticks=[1,10]),Guide.yticks(ticks=[1,10]))

and sometimes the underlying matrices happen to be zero, and I think this is a corner-case missing from plot(), e.g.,

julia> plot(x=[],y=[],Guide.xticks(ticks=[1,10]),Guide.yticks(ticks=[1,10]))
ERROR: BoundsError: attempt to access 0-element Array{Any,1}
  at index [1]
 in first at abstractarray.jl:63
 in apply_statistic at /home/joachim/.julia/v0.4/Gadfly/src/statistics.jl:777
 in apply_statistics at /home/joachim/.julia/v0.4/Gadfly/src/statistics.jl:38
 in render_prepare at /home/joachim/.julia/v0.4/Gadfly/src/Gadfly.jl:676
 in render at /home/joachim/.julia/v0.4/Gadfly/src/Gadfly.jl:717
 in draw at /home/joachim/.julia/v0.4/Gadfly/src/Gadfly.jl:821

[bjarthur]

a similar corner case which errors out is when all(isnan,y)==true

[acrosby]

Any progress on this, or a clever work around? Thanks!

[kilianbreathnach]

I've managed to use hstack and vstack to make an array of subplots with empty space in place of certain axes with this hack:

subplots = Array{Gadfly.Plot, 1}(9)

for i in 1:9

    <...>

    if (<"some condition">)
        subplots[i] = plot(x=[0,1], y=[0,1], Geom.point,
                           Guide.xticks(ticks=nothing), Guide.yticks(ticks=nothing),
                           Guide.xlabel(nothing), Guide.ylabel(nothing),
                           Theme(default_color="white"))
        end

    <...>

end

fig = vstack(hstack(subplots[1:3]), hstack(subplots[4:6]), hstack(subplots[7:9]))

So basically just a plot of white points with no axes or labels.

[bjarthur]

i think the original poster was hoping to have <some condition> checked for automatically. to leave a panel blank, it's easiest to just use context(), as described here.