tmap option defaults & styles: your opinions?

[mtennekes]

(a follow-up from https://github.com/r-tmap/tmap/issues/593)

Before v4 can be released on CRAN, we need to make sure all the default values for the options and (closely related) all the styles are intuitive to use.

There are over 600 options in tmap4, but I am talking about the most important ones from a user perspective: default colors, color scales, font sizes, legend frames, etc.

I've made some changes to the default option values, most importantly:

• the position of the legend (now outside) and its design
• color palettes color blind friendly (see side-project https://mtennekes.github.io/cols4all/)

This set of default option values is known by tmap4 as the style "white".

> tmap_style()
current tmap style is ""white" (tmap default)
other available styles are: "gray", "natural", "cobalt", "albatross", "beaver", "bw", "classic", "watercolor"
tmap v3 styles: "v3" (tmap v3 default), "gray_v3", "natural_v3", "cobalt_v3", "albatross_v3", "beaver_v3", "bw_v3", "classic_v3", "watercolor_v3"

So far ((https://github.com/r-tmap/tmap/commit/feae681edf16c7398d5cdc9377eafbc29436a170), all the other styles have been copied directly from v3. For each style, say "cobalt" there is a new version (also called "cobalt"), that takes all color (palette) options but with the new tmap4 changes (e.g. legends), and a version named "cobalt_v3"that replicates this style as close as possible to this style in tmap3.

Please run and check the output of

tmap_style_catalog()

I'd like to remain all v3 styles (iIncluding "col_blind_v3" that is still missing) for backward compatibility.

Questions for you:

• Which existing styles ("gray", "natural", "cobalt", "albatross", "beaver", "bw", "classic", "watercolor") do you find useful and why?
• What defaults would you like to change (colors, palettes, etc) for which style?
• Which existing style do you find useless, and can be dropped?
• Do you have other ideas for styles?

My own answers (just an opinion):

• My favourites: classic, natural, cobalt
• "bw": the only option that is set here is color.intensity = 0. So all color palettes except sequential are useless here and need to be changed.
• The style "gray" was a default the same "white" but only with a gray background. Not sure I ever used it.... "watercolor" is only useful when using the "view" mode. "albatross" is similar to "cobalt" but I like it less.

What are your opinions?