ggplot2

More tidyverse! Probably the favourite plotting system for R these days.

Kieran Healy advises the following set up for visualisation in the tidyverse style :

my_packages <- c("tidyverse", "broom", "coefplot", "cowplot",
    "gapminder", "GGally", "ggrepel", "ggridges",X "gridExtra",
    "interplot", "margins", "maps", "mapproj", "mapdata",
    "MASS", "quantreg", "scales", "survey", "srvyr",
    "viridis", "viridisLite", "devtools")

install.packages(my_packages,
    repos = "http://cran.rstudio.com")

• The ggplot2 reference is thorough but utterly inscrutable without knowing the philosophy of the thing.
• Fancy new features are best discovered via the extension gallery.
• The cheat sheet has useful graphical references, which is the appropriate way to consider this thing.
• Max Woolf’s simple ggplot tutorial
• The ggplot book is available free if you build it yourself
• The ggplot chapter of R for data science.
• Want arbitrary lines and stuff to appear in the legends? E.g. a mean line or multiple model fits.
• diagrammer emits your graphs as javascript widgets. V Web2.0 wow.
• ggvis is the latest iteration of the Hadley Wickham’s ggplot family, AFAICT, but currently on hiatus
• animating is sort of possible using ggplot2 but it is not fun.

Other plotting systems

R Graphical Manual visualization of all CRAN R package example plots, and is searchable by topic.

MacOS cairo error

Do you get an error like this when plotting SVGs?

unable to load shared object '/usr/local/Cellar/r/3.5.0_1/lib/R/library/grDevices/libs//cairo.so':
dlopen(/usr/local/Cellar/r/3.5.0_1/lib/R/library/grDevices/libs//cairo.so, 6): image not found

That is because homebrew R doesn’t support the cairo library Yihui recommends:

brew cask install r

or you can install svglite

install.packages("svglite")

and use the device option dev = "svglite".