plot(): adjust vertical space on Y-axis

How to adjust the vertical space between labels as well as data points within my plot?

Some example data:

data <- data.frame(
  a = c(-2.5, -1.2, 0, 1.4, 2.8),
  b = c("Var1", "Var2", "Var3", "Var4", "Var5")  
)

plot(
  data$a,                         
  seq_along(data$a),         
  xaxt = "n",                      
  yaxt = "n"                     
)
axis(2, at = seq_along(data$b), labels = data$b, las = 2)

which produces:

I have no clue how to adjust this.

You have categorical y variables, so your y axis values are 1,2,3,4,5. So you could shrink the distance artificially by multiplying by 0.5 (at = seq_along(data$b)*0.5) but the visual would look the same because the y axis limits would just automatically adjust.

I think what you want to do is save the plot using different aspect ratios. For example:

jpeg(filename = 'junk.jpg', res = 800,
    height = 7, width = 12, units = 'in')

plot(
  data$a,                         
  seq_along(data$a),         
  xaxt = "n",                      
  yaxt = "n"                     
)
axis(2, at = seq_along(data$b), labels = data$b, las = 2)

dev.off()

This results in:

AND:

jpeg(filename = 'junk.jpeg', res = 800,
    height = 4, width = 8, units = 'in') # Change vertical size

plot(
  data$a,                         
  seq_along(data$a),         
  xaxt = "n",                      
  yaxt = "n"                     
)
axis(2, at = seq_along(data$b), labels = data$b, las = 2)

dev.off()

results in :

hope that helps!