increase legend font size ggplot2

Question

Is there a way to increase the font size in ggplot2? I think I need to specify something like legend.key.width = unit(2, "line") in the theme function, but that is used to adjust the keys in legends, not the font sizes. Thanks!

I normally refer to `?theme` for these kinds of questions – Ricardo Saporta Dec 05 '13 at 18:29 — Ricardo Saporta, Dec 05 '13 at 18:29

score 332 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 04 '18 at 09:27

332

You can use theme_get() to display the possible options for theme. You can control the legend font size using:

+ theme(legend.text=element_text(size=X))

replacing X with the desired size.

edited Sep 04 '18 at 09:27

loki

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answered Dec 05 '13 at 18:32

Dominic Edwards

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score 80 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 05 '18 at 07:33

80

theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 12, face = "bold"),
    legend.title=element_text(size=10), 
    legend.text=element_text(size=9))

edited Apr 05 '18 at 07:33

PatrickT

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answered Nov 01 '16 at 17:42

Ashish Markanday

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score 29 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 21 '17 at 17:29

29

You can also specify the font size relative to the base_size included in themes such as theme_bw() (where base_size is 11) using the rel() function.

For example:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(disp, mpg, col=as.factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(legend.text=element_text(size=rel(0.5)))

answered Dec 21 '17 at 17:29

Megatron

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So what does `rel(0.5)` result in? `5.5`? `11.5`? – bers Aug 04 '20 at 05:37
5

Given a base size of 11, and a 50% size relative to the parent, this would yield 5.5. – Megatron Aug 04 '20 at 13:54

score 11 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 24 '17 at 14:47

11

A simpler but equally effective option would be:

+ theme_bw(base_size=X)

answered Feb 24 '17 at 14:47

Jefferson Maia

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Careful. For me this changed other font sizes too (e.g. title, axis labels). – seane Mar 14 '17 at 20:47

increase legend font size ggplot2

4 Answers4

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