NEWS.md

ggplot2 1.1.0

Major changes

• ggplot no longer throws an error if you your plot has no layers. Instead it automatically adds geom_blank() (#1246).

• New cut_width() is a convenient replacement for the verbose plyr::round_any(), with the additional benefit of offering finer control.

• New geom_count() is a convenient alias to stat_sum(). Use it when you have overlapping points on a scatterplot. stat_sum() now defaults to using counts instead of proportions.

• New geom_curve() adds curved lines, with a similar specification to geom_segment() (@veraanadi, #1088).

• Date and datetime scales now have date_breaks, date_minor_breaks and date_labels arguments so that you never need to use the long scales::date_breaks() or scales::date_format().

• geom_bar() now has it's own stat, distinct from stat_bin() which was also used by geom_histogram(). geom_bar() now uses stat_count() which counts values at each distinct value of x (i.e. it does not bin the data first). This can be useful when you want to show exactly which values are used in a continuous variable.

• geom_point() gains a stroke aesthetic which controls the border width of shapes 21-25 (#1133, @SeySayux). size and stroke are additive so a point with size = 5 and stroke = 5 will have a diameter of 10mm. (#1142)

• New position_nudge() allows you to slightly offset labels (or other geoms) from their corresponding points (#1109).

• scale_size() now maps values to area, not radius. Use scale_radius() if you want the old behaviour (not recommended, except perhaps for lines).

• New stat_summary_bin() works like stat_summary() but on binned data. It's a generalisation of stat_bin() that can compute any aggregate, not just counts (#1274).

• Layers are now much stricter about their arguments - you will get an error if you've supplied an argument that isn't an aesthetic or a parameter. This is likely to cause some short-term pain but in the long-term it will make it much easier to spot spelling mistakes and other errors (#1293).

  This change does break a handful of geoms/stats that used ... to pass additional arguments on to the underlying computation. Now geom_smooth()/stat_smooth() and geom_quantile()/stat_quantile() use method.args instead (#1245, #1289); and stat_summary() (#1242), stat_summary_hex(), and stat_summary2d() use fun.args.

Extensibility

There is now an official mechanism for defining Stats, Geoms, and Positions in other packages. See vignette("extending-ggplot2") for details.

• All Geoms, Stats and Positions are now exported, so you can inherit from them when making your own objects (#989).

• ggplot2 no longer uses proto or reference classes. Instead, we now use ggproto, a new OO system designed specifically for ggplot2. Unlike proto and RC, ggproto supports clean cross-package inheritance. Creating a new OO system isn't usually the right way to solve a problem, but I'm pretty sure it was necessary here. Read more about it in the vignette.

• aes_() replaces aes_q(). It also supports formulas, so the most concise SE version of aes(carat, price) is now aes_(~carat, ~price). You may want to use this form in packages, as it will avoid spurious R CMD check warnings about undefined global variables.

Text

• geom_text() has been overhauled to make labelling your data a little easier. It:

  • nudge_x and nudge_y arguments let you offset labels from their corresponding points (#1120).

  • check_overlap = TRUE provides a simple way to avoid overplotting of labels: labels that would otherwise overlap are omitted (#1039).

  • hjust and vjust can now be character vectors: "left", "center", "right", "bottom", "middle", "top". New options include "inward" and "outward" which align text towards and away from the center of the plot respectively.

• geom_label() works like geom_text() but draws a rounded rectangle underneath each label (#1039). This is useful when you want to label plots that are dense with data.

Deprecated features

• The little used aes_auto() has been deprecated.

• aes_q() has been replaced with aes_() to be consistent with SE versions of NSE functions in other packages.

• The order aesthetic is officially deprecated. It never really worked, and was poorly documented.

• The stat and position arguments to qplot() have been deprecated. qplot() is designed for quick plots - if you need to specify position or stat, use ggplot() instead.

• The theme setting axis.ticks.margin has been deprecated: now use the margin property of axis.ticks.

• stat_abline(), stat_hline() and stat_vline() have been removed: these were never suitable for use other than with geom_abline() etc and were not documented.

• show_guide has been renamed to show.legend: this more accurately reflects what it does (controls appearance of layer in legend), and uses the same convention as other ggplot2 arguments (i.e. a . between names). (Yes, I know that's inconsistent with function names with use _, but it's too late to change now.)

A number of geoms have been renamed to be internally consistent:

• stat_binhex() and stat_bin2d() have been renamed to stat_bin_hex() and stat_bin_2d() (#1274). stat_summary2d() has been renamed to stat_summary_2d()

• stat_spoke() is now geom_spoke() since I realised it's a reparameterisation of `geom_segment().

• stat_bindot() has been removed because it's so tightly coupled to geom_dotplot(). If you happened to use stat_bindot(), just change to geom_dotplot() (#1194).

All defunct functions have been removed.

Default appearance

• The default theme_grey() background colour has been changed from "grey90" to "grey92": this makes the background a little less visually prominent.

• Labels and titles have been tweaked for readability:

  • Axes labels are darker.

  • Legend and axis titles are given the same visual treatment.

  • The default font size dropped from 12 to 11. You might be surprised that I've made the default text size smaller as it was already hard for many people to read. It turns out there was a bug in RStudio (fixed in 0.99.724), that shrunk the text of all grid based graphics. Once that was resolved the defaults seemed too big to my eyes.

  • More spacing between titles and borders.

  • Default margins scale with the theme font size, so the appearance at larger font sizes should be considerably improved (#1228).

• element_text() gains a margins argument which allows you to add additional padding around text elements. To help see what's going on use debug = TRUE to display the text region and anchors.

• The default font size in geom_text() has been decreased from 5mm (14 pts) to 3.8 mm (11 pts) to match the new default theme sizes.

• A diagonal line is no longer drawn on bar and rectangle legends. Instead, the border has been tweaked to be more visible, and more closely match the size of line drawn on the plot.

• The default line size for geom_smooth() has been increased from 0.5 to 1 to make it easier to see when overlaid on data.

• geom_bar() and geom_rect() use a slightly paler shade of grey so they aren't so visually heavy.

• geom_point() now uses shape 19 instead of 16. This looks much better on the default Linux graphics device. (It's very slightly smaller than the old point, but it shouldn't affect any graphics significantly)

• Sizes in ggplot2 are measured in mm. Previously they were converted to pts (for use in grid) by multiplying by 72 / 25.4. However, grid uses printer's points, not Adobe (big pts), so sizes are now correctly multiplied by 72.27 / 25.4. This is unlikely to noticeably affect display, but it's technically correct (https://youtu.be/hou0lU8WMgo).

• The default legend will now allocate multiple rows (if vertical) or columns (if horizontal) in order to make a legend that is more likely to fit on the screen. You can override with the nrow/ncol arguments to guide_legend()

  p <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ,hwy, colour = model)) + geom_point()
  p
  p + theme(legend.position = "bottom")
  # Previous behaviour
  p + guides(colour = guide_legend(ncol = 1))

New and updated themes

• New theme_void() is completely empty. It's useful for plots with non- standard coordinates or for drawings (@jiho, #976).

• New theme_dark() has a dark background designed to make colours pop out (@jiho, #1018)

• theme_minimal() became slightly more minimal by removing the axis ticks: labels now line up directly beneath grid lines (@tomschloss, #1084)

• New theme setting panel.ontop (logical) make it possible to place background elements (i.e., gridlines) on top of data. Best used with transparent panel.background (@noamross. #551).

Labelling

The facet labelling system was updated with many new features and a more flexible interface (@lionel-). It now works consistently across grid and wrap facets. The most important user visible changes are:

• facet_wrap() gains a labeller option (#25).

• facet_grid() and facet_wrap() gain a switch argument to display the facet titles near the axes. When switched, the labels become axes subtitles. switch can be set to "x", "y" or "both" (the latter only for grids) to control which margin is switched.

The labellers (such as label_value() or label_both()) also get some new features:

• They now offer the multi_line argument to control whether to display composite facets (those specified as ~var1 + var2) on one or multiple lines.

• In label_bquote() you now refer directly to the names of variables. With this change, you can create math expressions that depend on more than one variable. This math expression can be specified either for the rows or the columns and you can also provide different expressions to each margin.

  As a consequence of these changes, referring to x in backquoted expressions is deprecated.

• Similarly to label_bquote(), labeller() now take .rows and .cols arguments. In addition, it also takes .default. labeller() is useful to customise how particular variables are labelled. The three additional arguments specify how to label the variables are not specifically mentioned, respectively for rows, columns or both. This makes it especially easy to set up a project-wide labeller dispatcher that can be reused across all your plots. See the documentation for an example.

• The new labeller label_context() adapts to the number of factors facetted over. With a single factor, it displays only the values, just as before. But with multiple factors in a composite margin (e.g. with ~cyl + am), the labels are passed over to label_both(). This way the variables names are displayed with the values to help identifying them.

On the programming side, the labeller API has been rewritten in order to offer more control when facetting over multiple factors (e.g. with formulae such as ~cyl + am). This also means that if you have written custom labellers, you will need to update them for this version of ggplot.

• Previously, a labeller function would take variable and value arguments and return a character vector. Now, they take a data frame of character vectors and return a list. The input data frame has one column per factor facetted over and each column in the returned list becomes one line in the strip label. See documentation for more details.

• The labels received by a labeller now contain metadata: their margin (in the "type" attribute) and whether they come from a wrap or a grid facet (in the "facet" attribute).

• Note that the new as_labeller() function operator provides an easy way to transform an existing function to a labeller function. The existing function just needs to take and return a character vector.

Documentation

• Improved documentation for aes(), layer() and much much more.

• I've tried to reduce the use of ... so that you can see all the documentation in one place rather than having to integrate multiple pages. In some cases this has involved adding additional arguments to geoms to make it more clear what you can do:

  • geom_smooth() gains explicit method, se and formula arguments.

  • geom_histogram() gains binwidth, bins, originandright` arguments.

  • geom_jitter() gains width and height arguments to make it easier to control the amount of jittering without using the lengthy position_jitter() function (#1116)

• Use of qplot() in examples has been minimised (#1123, @hrbrmstr). This is inline with the 2nd edition of the ggplot2 box, which minimises the use of qplot() in favour of ggplot().

• Tighly linked geoms and stats (e.g. geom_boxplot() and stat_boxplot()) are now documented in the same file so you can see all the arguments in one place. Variations of the same idea (e.g. geom_path(), geom_line(), and geom_step()) are also documented together.

• It's now obvious that you can set the binwidth parameter for stat_bin_hex(), stat_summary_hex(), stat_bin_2d(), and stat_summary_2d().

• The internals of positions have been cleaned up considerably. You're unlikely to notice any external changes, although the documentation should be a little less confusing since positions now don't list parameters they never use.

Data

• All datasets have class tbl_df so if you also use dplyr, you get a better print method.

• economics has been brought up to date to 2015-04-01.

• New economics_long is the economics data in long form.

• New txhousing dataset containing information about the Texas housing market. Useful for examples that need multiple time series, and for demonstrating model+vis methods.

• New luv_colours dataset which contains the locations of all built-in colors() in Luv space.

• movies has been moved into its own package, ggplot2movies, because it was large and not terribly useful. If you've used the movies dataset, you'll now need to explicitly load the package with library(ggplot2movies).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• All partially matched arguments and $ have been been replaced with full matches (@jimhester, #1134).

• ggplot2 now exports alpha() from the scales package (#1107), and arrow() and unit() from grid (#1225). This means you don't need attach scales/grid or do scales::/grid:: for these commonly used functions.

• aes_string() now only parses character inputs. This fixes bugs when using it with numbers and non default OutDec settings (#1045).

• annotation_custom() automatically adds a unique id to each grob name, making it easier to plot multiple grobs with the same name (e.g. grobs of ggplot2 graphics) in the same plot (#1256).

• coord_cartesian() applies the same expansion factor to limits as for scales. You can suppress with expand = FALSE (#1207).

• cut_number() gives error message if the number of requested bins can be created because there are two few unique values (#1046).

• Character labels in facet_grid() are no longer (incorrectly) coerced into factors. This caused problems with custom label functions (#1070).

• facet_wrap() and facet_grid() now allow you to use non-standard variable names by surrounding them with backticks (#1067).

• facet_wrap() more carefully checks its nrow and ncol arguments to ensure that they're specified correctly (@richierocks, #962)

• facet_wrap() gains a dir argument to control the direction the panels are wrapped in. The default is "h" for horizontal. Use "v" for vertical layout (#1260).

• geom_abline(), geom_hline() and geom_vline() have been rewritten to have simpler behaviour and be more consistent:

  • stat_abline(), stat_hline() and stat_vline() have been removed: these were never suitable for use other than with geom_abline() etc and were not documented.

  • geom_abline(), geom_vline() and geom_hline() are bound to stat_identity() and position_identity()

  • Intercept parameters can no longer be set to a function.

  • They are all documented in one file, since they are so closely related.

• geom_bin2d() will now let you specify one dimension's breaks exactly, without touching the other dimension's default breaks at all (#1126).

• geom_crossbar() sets grouping correctly so you can display multiple crossbars on one plot. It also makes the default fatten argument a little bigger to make the middle line more obvious (#1125).

• geom_histogram() and geom_smooth() now only inform you about the default values once per layer, rather than once per panel (#1220).

• geom_pointrange() gains fatten argument so you can control the size of the point relative to the size of the line.

• geom_segment() annotations were not transforming with scales (@BrianDiggs, #859).

• geom_smooth() is no longer so chatty. If you want to know what the deafult smoothing method is, look it up in the documentation! (#1247)

• geom_violin() now has the ability to draw quantile lines (@DanRuderman).

• ggplot() now captures the parent frame to use for evaluation, rather than always defaulting to the global environment. This should make ggplot more suitable to use in more situations (e.g. with knitr)

• ggsave() has been simplified a little to make it easier to maintain. It no longer checks that you're printing a ggplot2 object (so now also works with any grid grob) (#970), and always requires a filename. Parameter device now supports character argument to specify which supported device to use ('pdf', 'png', 'jpeg', etc.), for when it cannot be correctly inferred from the file extension (for example when a temporary filename is supplied server side in shiny apps) (@sebkopf, #939). It no longer opens a graphics device if one isn't already open - this is annoying when you're running from a script (#1326).

• guide_colorbar() creates correct legend if only one color (@krlmlr, #943).

• guide_colorbar() no longer fails when the legend is empty - previously this often masked misspecifications elsewhere in the plot (#967).

• New layer_data() function extracts the data used for plotting for a given layer. It's mostly useful for testing.

• You can now suppress the appearance of an axis/legend title (and the space that would allocated for it) with NULL in the scale_ function. To use the default lable, use waiver() (#1145).

• Position adjustments no longer warn about potentially varying ranges because the problem rarely occurs in practice and there are currently a lot of false positives since I don't understand exactly what FP criteria I should be testing.

• scale_fill_grey() now uses red for missing values. This matches scale_colour_grey() and makes it obvious where missing values lie. Override with na.value.

• scale_*_gradient2() defaults to using Lab colour space.

• scale_*_gradientn() now allows colours or colors (#1290)

• scale_y_continuous() now also transforms the lower, middle and upper aesthetics used by geom_boxplot(): this only affects geom_boxplot(stat = "identity") (#1020).

• Legends no longer inherit aesthetics if inherit.aes is FALSE (#1267).

• lims() makes it easy to set the limits of any axis (#1138).

• labels = NULL now works with guide_legend() and guide_colorbar(). (#1175, #1183).

• override.aes now works with American aesthetic spelling, e.g. color

• Scales no longer round data points to improve performance of colour palettes. Instead the scales package now uses a much faster colour interpolation algorithm (#1022).

• scale_*_brewer() and scale_*_distiller() add new direction argument of scales::brewer_pal, making it easier to change the order of colours (@jiho, #1139).

• scale_x_date() now clips dates outside the limits in the same way as scale_x_continuous() (#1090).

• stat_bin() gains bins arguments, which denotes the number of bins. Now you can set bins=100 instead of binwidth=0.5. Note that breaks or binwidth will override it (@tmshn, #1158, #102).

• stat_boxplot() warns if a continuous variable is used for the x aesthetic without also supplying a group aesthetic (#992, @krlmlr).

• stat_summary_2d() and stat_bin_2d() now share exactly the same code for determining breaks from bins, binwidth, and origin.

• stat_summary_2d() and stat_bin_2d() now output in tile/raster compatible form instead of rect compatible form.

• Automatically computed breaks do not lead to an error for transformations like "probit" where the inverse can map to infinity (#871, @krlmlr)

• stat_function() now always evaluates the function on the original scale. Previously it computed the function on transformed scales, giving incorrect values (@BrianDiggs, #1011).

• strip_dots works with anonymous functions within calculated aesthetics (e.g. aes(sapply(..density.., function(x) mean(x)))) (#1154, @NikNakk)

• theme() gains validate = FALSE parameter to turn off validation, and hence store arbitrary additional data in the themes. (@tdhock, #1121)

• Improved the calculation of segments needed to draw the curve representing a line when plotted in polar coordinates. In some cases, the last segment of a multi-segment line was not drawn (@BrianDiggs, #952)