How to remove the thin vertical line in orchard_plot() that affects x-axis alignment across multiple plots?

[ShengwenXu98]

Hi orchaRd team,

Thanks for developing such a powerful visualization tool for meta-analysis! I’m using orchard_plot() for subgroup analysis with angle = 90 and combining multiple orchard plots (e.g., by land type, fertilizer type, cropping regime) using cowplot::plot_grid(). However, I encountered an issue where a very thin vertical line appears in each orchard plot and prevents the x-axes from aligning across subplots.

Here are the details:

I’ve already set trunk.size = 0, twig.size = 0, g = FALSE, and k = FALSE.

I’ve also set scale_x_continuous(limits = c(-1, 5), expand = c(0, 0)) to force all plots to share the same x-axis.

Still, each plot seems to retain a faint vertical line (possibly a default geom_linerange() or similar?) that takes up plotting space and makes zero lines appear misaligned when stacking the figures.

Questions:

What exactly is this line? Is it part of the CI layer (e.g., geom_linerange) or another internal structure?

Is there currently a way to remove or suppress this layer completely while still keeping the CI bars for each subgroup?

Would it be possible to add a new argument to orchard_plot() to disable this line explicitly?

Thank you so much for your time and consideration. I’d be happy to provide a minimal reproducible example if needed!

Best regards,

[ShengwenXu98]

packageVersion("orchaRd")
[1] ‘2.0’

[ShengwenXu98]

To remove it, I had to do the following:

Removing the prediction interval from p4

geom_classes <- sapply(p4$layers, function(layer) class(layer$geom)[1])

Identify second GeomLinerange as the prediction interval

linerange_indices <- which(geom_classes == "GeomLinerange")

Remove only the prediction interval layer

p4$layers <- p4$layers[-linerange_indices[2]]

Could you consider adding an argument to orchard_plot() such as:
prediction = FALSE # or show_prediction = TRUE
…so that users can explicitly disable drawing of prediction intervals when not needed?

Thanks again for your time and fantastic work on this package!

Cheers,
Shengwen

[itchyshin]

@ShengwenXu98 - please go to this repo and ask these questions - https://github.com/daniel1noble/orchaRd