Figures

Last updated: January 18, 2021

Getting decent-looking plots with ggplot2

There’s a list of all the ggplot2 themes, but I don’t think any of them are great – they all have at least one weird element (no axis lines, hidden axis labels, non-white backgrounds, etc.).

Instead of the defaults, I like using ggpubr, which provides a nicer set of themes suitable for publications and presentations.

The BBC has a set of defaults for ggplot2 that is worth looking at.

The default color schemes aren’t great either. ggsci provides some good alternatives.

The R Graph Gallery is a good resource for good-looking plots.

ggplot GUI is an online interface for dynamically exploring ggplot2 plots.

ASCII plots

Sometimes it’s helpful to have ASCII (text-based) plots. txtplot is a package for doing this:

> library(txtplot)
> with(cars, txtplot(speed,dist))
    +---+----------+----------+---------+----------+-+
120 +                                            *   +
100 +                                                +
    |                                            *   |
 80 +                      *        *              * +
    |                               * *          *   |
 60 +                      *        *   *   *        +
    |                    *    *   *   * *     *      |
 40 +                      *    * * * *              +
    |              * * * * *  * * *     *            |
 20 +        * *   * * *      *                      +
    | *      *   *                                   |
  0 +---+----------+----------+---------+----------+-+
        5         10         15        20         25

Figures

Arranging multiple figures

There are a few ways to do this:

• patchwork
• ggpubr
• Laying out multiple plots on a page

Themes

See Complete themes – ggplot2.

Tables for publication

• tangram is a tool for creating “rich summary tables”.
• table1 is another interesting package for publication-quality tables.
• flextable can produce well-formatted HTML tables from data frames.

kintr::kable

I’ve had great luck with making custom tables for publication with knitr::kable and kableExtra.

Some resources: - Create Awesome HTML Table with knitr::kable and kableExtra - If you need to use variables inside add_header_above(), you can use setNames(2, varname).

I was not able to figure out an easy way to reference tables and figures in R Markdown text. The captioner package is supposed to fix this, but it hasn’t been updated in 3 years so I’m not sure how well it actually works.

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