change background and text of strips associated to multiple panels in R / lattice

Here’s a clean and easily customizable solution.

myStripStyle(), the function that is passed in to the strip= argument of xyplot() uses the counter variable which.panel to select colors and also the value of factor.levels for the panel that’s currently being plotted.

If you want to play around with the settings, just put a browser() somewhere inside the definition of myStripStyle() and have at it!

bgColors <- c("black", "green4", "blue", "red", "purple", "yellow")
txtColors <- c("white", "yellow", "white", "white", "green", "red")

# Create a function to be passed to "strip=" argument of xyplot
myStripStyle <- function(which.panel, factor.levels, ...) {
    panel.rect(0, 0, 1, 1,
               col = bgColors[which.panel],
               border = 1)
    panel.text(x = 0.5, y = 0.5,
               font=2,
               lab = factor.levels[which.panel],
               col = txtColors[which.panel])
}    
xyplot(yield ~ year | site, data = barley, strip=myStripStyle)

enter image description here

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