make textplot functions into generics

kbenoit commented 4 years ago

Looks good! We have too few options (and not enough imagination) when it comes to text visualizations and this is a good step forward.

Request: If you define each textplot_*() function as a generic, then it would be easy to extend with methods for other package objects, which I would be happy to contribute for quanteda for instance.

This is how we have all of the textplot_*() functions in quanteda. This made it easier recently for me to add a new method to textplot_wordcloud() for keyness statistics, to get contrasting clouds of keywords. See https://github.com/quanteda/quanteda/pull/1940 for example.

jwijffels commented 4 years ago

Indeed good suggestion. I made the changes in commit https://github.com/bnosac/textplot/commit/99ec74cd5e1576c976a0376b2c5d3cea65986087. All textplot_*() functions are now S3 generic.

Feel free to contribute if you like. Note that

Package philosophy is to put in Imports packages which are either base or recommended or data.table and in Suggests other packages specific for the function and use requireNamespace('thepackage') where you need them in the functions.
That will allow to decommission functions which require packages which are abandoned on CRAN and impact textplot quickly.

jwijffels commented 4 years ago

Closing. Plot generics are now on CRAN.

bnosac / textplot

make textplot functions into generics #2