How do I make my facets perfectly square?

Question

I'm using facet_wrap with ggplot to create a plot of facets. My problem is that my facets always come out looking like very short, very wide rectangles, but I want them to be square so they are easier to understand. Ideally, I would like to specify the number of columns I desire, and have ggplot figure out what the height of the plot should be so that all the facets are square. Is this possible?

`library(fortunes); fortune("Yoda")` -- "Simon Blomberg: This is R. There is no if. Only how." You'll need to count the total number of facets (i.e. number of levels of your faceting variable), divide by the number of columns to get the number of rows, and use `ggsave()` to save a plot with the right overall aspect ratio ... accounting for the decoration (legends, axes labels, etc.) might make it a little harder but you can probably get close. — Ben Bolker, Jan 22 '14 at 22:26
You may want to put your facets into separate plots and arrange them with `grid.arrange(...)`. Read the documentation on the `gridExtra` package, especially `grid.layout(...)` and `grid.arrange(...)`. Otherwise, provide a representative sample of your data and show us what you are getting now. — jlhoward, Jan 22 '14 at 22:27

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 22 '14 at 22:33

13

Maybe aspect.ratio helps:

df <- data.frame(x = runif(100, 0,10), y = runif(100, 0, 50), z=gl(4,25))
ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  facet_wrap(~ z, ncol = 4) + 
  theme(aspect.ratio = 1) # try with and without

answered Jan 22 '14 at 22:33

lukeA

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This didn't work for me only because I'm using an older version of ggplot. coord_fixed(1) seemed to accomplish this same thing. – andrew Jan 23 '14 at 16:56
Accepting this one because it should work for people with latest version of ggplot and using theme() is nicer than my solution. – andrew Jan 28 '14 at 15:31

andrew · Answer 2 · 2014-01-23T18:23:14.847

1

Using coord_fixed(1) did the trick. Seems I'm using an older version of ggplot so theme(aspect.ratio=1) did not work for me.

df <- data.frame(x = runif(100, 0,10), y = runif(100, 0, 50), z=gl(4,25))
ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  facet_wrap(~ z, ncol = 4) + 
  coord_fixed(1)

edited Jan 23 '14 at 18:23

answered Jan 23 '14 at 16:54

andrew

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 22 '14 at 22:45

I understood the question slightly differently than lukeA. I thought you wanted the plots to be arranged in an n x m fashion with dimensions as close to "square" as possible.

ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  facet_wrap(~ z, ncol = sqrt(length(levels(df$z))) )

enter image description here

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 22 '14 at 23:03

0

g = ggplotGrob(p)
g$respect = TRUE
require(grid)
grid.draw(g)

answered Jan 22 '14 at 23:03

baptiste

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How do I make my facets perfectly square?

4 Answers4