1

It seems to be the case that as soon as I call theme() in ggplot2 my previous labs() for the same plot gets deleted/overwritten. I surfed for 5 hours now and I do not see the solution. Does anyone see the reason why this happens? You would save my week.

This is my code: 

#creating variables and store them in new data frame

rel_pred <- fitted(rel)
rel_resid <- residuals(rel)
data1 <- data.frame(rel_resid, rel_pred)`

#plot the data

plot1 <- ggplot(data1, aes(x=rel_pred,y=rel_resid)) + 
geom_point() + 
geom_hline(yintercept=0, colour='red') #so far so good, everything works

plot1 + labs(y="Residuals", x="Fitted Values SF-12 MCS", caption="Figure  
1. Residuals vs. fitted Values Model 1") #when I run this, it perfectly 
adds labels

Here comes the problem: as soon as I run theme() with whatever elements in there, it will make my previous labels disappear. 

plot1 + theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill='transparent'),
plot.background = element_rect(fill='transparent'),
panel.border = element_blank(),
axis.line = element_line(colour="black", size=1),
axis.title.x = element_text(colour='black',size=6),
axis.title.y = element_text(colour='black', size=6),
plot.caption = element_text('Figure 1. Residuals vs. fitted Values Model   
1')
)
Richard Telford
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Lynn
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1 Answers1

2

As Richard said, you forgot to "update" plot1 as the result of adding labels to the original plot.

Here:

plot1 <- ggplot(data1, aes(x=rel_pred,y=rel_resid)) + 
geom_point() + 
geom_hline(yintercept=0, colour='red') #so far so good, everything works

plot1 + labs(y="Residuals", x="Fitted Values SF-12 MCS", caption="Figure  
1. Residuals vs. fitted Values Model 1") #when I run this, it perfectly 
adds labels

Try instead

plot1 <- ggplot(data1, aes(x=rel_pred,y=rel_resid)) + 
geom_point() + 
geom_hline(yintercept=0, colour='red') #so far so good, everything works

plot1 <-  plot1 + labs(y="Residuals", x="Fitted Values SF-12 MCS", caption="Figure  
1. Residuals vs. fitted Values Model 1") # no output now, it will save the result as plot1

and then 

plot1 + theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill='transparent'),
plot.background = element_rect(fill='transparent'),
panel.border = element_blank(),
axis.line = element_line(colour="black", size=1),
axis.title.x = element_text(colour='black',size=6),
axis.title.y = element_text(colour='black', size=6),
plot.caption = element_text('Figure 1. Residuals vs. fitted Values Model   
1')
)

will work as expected

HAVB
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