ggplot2 is now over 10 years old and is used by hundreds of thousands of people to make millions of plots. That means, by-and-large, ggplot2 itself changes relatively little. When we do make changes, they will be generally to add new functions or arguments rather than changing the behaviour of existing functions, and if we do make changes to ...

Data. As the foundation of every graphic, ggplot2 uses data to construct a plot. The system works best if the data is provided in a tidy format, which briefly means a rectangular data frame structure where rows are observations and columns are variables. As the first step in many plots, you would pass the data to the ggplot() function, which stores the data to be used later by other parts of ...

autoplot() is an extension mechanism for ggplot2: it provides a way for package authors to add methods that work like the base plot() function, generating useful default plots with little user interaction. fortify() turns objects into tidy data frames: it has largely been superseded by the broom package.

ggplot() initializes a ggplot object. It can be used to declare the input data frame for a graphic and to specify the set of plot aesthetics intended to be common throughout all subsequent layers unless specifically overridden.

ggplot2-package.Rd A system for 'declaratively' creating graphics, based on "The Grammar of Graphics". You provide the data, tell 'ggplot2' how to map variables to aesthetics, what graphical primitives to use, and it takes care of the details.

In addition, ggplot2 provides a conversion factor as the variable .pt, so if you want to draw 12pt text, you can also set size = 12 / .pt. Justification Horizontal and vertical justification have the same parameterisation, either a string (“top”, “middle”, “bottom”, “left”, “center”, “right”) or a number between 0 and 1:

In ggplot2, a plot is constructed by adding layers to it. In addition to geoms and stats, position adjustments are the third required part of a layer. The 'position' part of a layer is responsible for dodging, jittering and nudging groups of data to minimise their overlap, or otherwise tweaking their positions. For example if you add position = position_nudge(x = 1) to a layer, you can offset ...

Good labels are critical for making your plots accessible to a wider audience. Always ensure the axis and legend labels display the full variable name. Use the plot title and subtitle to explain the main findings. It's common to use the caption to provide information about the data source. tag can be used for adding identification tags to differentiate between multiple plots. get_labs ...

Even if you use many ggplot2 functions in your package, it is unwise to use ggplot2 in Depends or import the entire package into your NAMESPACE (e.g. with #' @import ggplot2).Using ggplot2 in Depends will attach ggplot2 when your package is attached, which includes when your package is tested. This makes it difficult to ensure that others can use the functions in your package …

The classic dark-on-light ggplot2 theme. May work better for presentations displayed with a projector. theme_linedraw() A theme with only black lines of various widths on white backgrounds, reminiscent of a line drawing. Serves a purpose similar to theme_bw(). Note that this theme has some very thin lines (<< 1 pt) which some journals may refuse.