Increase Space Between Legend Keys Without Increasing Legend Keys

Increase space between legend keys without increasing legend keys

One solution is to replace lines with points (requires additional geom layer):

Create plot with invisible points (size = 0 and rectangle shape shape = 15).

p <- ggplot(d, aes(x, ..density..)) + 
    geom_histogram(fill = "lightblue", color = "black") + 
    geom_vline(data = vlines, mapping = aes(xintercept = x, colour = stat)) +
    geom_point(data = vlines, aes(0, 0, colour = stat), size = 0, shape = 15)

Add legend theme to:

• Mask background color in legend (legend.key = element_rect(fill = "white"))
• Create large legend (legend.key.height = unit(3, "cm"))
• Remove lines (linetype = 0) and make large points (size = 5)

Code:

p + 
    theme(legend.direction = "vertical", 
          legend.position = "right",
          legend.key = element_rect(fill = "white"),
          legend.key.height = unit(3, "cm")) +
    guides(color = guide_legend(override.aes = list(linetype = 0, size = 5)))

PS.:

• This is not a perfect solution as there's a gap between legend label and boxes.
• If you want lines instead of rectangles use shape = 73

Increase Vertical Spacing between Legend Key in ggplot2

After browsing ggplot2's source code for a bit, I come to the conclusion that the legend.spacing.y is only applied when the byrow = TRUE as argument to the legend.

Simplied example below.

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Width)) +
  geom_density(aes(fill = Species)) +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(byrow = TRUE)) +
  theme(legend.spacing.y = unit(1, "cm"))

With regards to the labels, just remove the values from the breaks argument in scale_y_continuous() that you don't want to show, you're already specifying them manually.

ggplot2 increase space between legend keys

An alternative (and probably easier) solution is using legend.key and legend.key.size in the theme part of your code:

ggplot(data = mtcars, aes(mpg, wt, colour = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point() +
  guides(color = guide_legend(nrow = 2)) +
  theme(legend.direction = 'horizontal', 
        legend.position = 'bottom',
        legend.key = element_rect(size = 5),
        legend.key.size = unit(1.5, 'lines'))

this gives:

---

In case you are calling theme_bw or theme_classic before manipulating the legend, you should set the color of the legend rectangle:

legend.key = element_rect(size = 5, color = 'white') #or: color = NA

Spacing between legend keys in ggplot

Adding a margin to adjust element_text

mtcars %>%
  mutate(transmission = ifelse(am, "manual", "automatic")) %>%
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = transmission, fill = transmission) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(fill = NULL) +
  theme(
    #legend.spacing.x = unit(.5, "char"), # adds spacing to the left too
    legend.position = "top",
    legend.justification = c(0, 0),
    legend.title = element_blank(),
    legend.margin = margin(c(5, 5, 5, 0)),
    legend.text = element_text(margin = margin(r = 10, unit = "pt")))

Modify spacing between key glyphs in vertical legend whilst keeping key glyph border

There is a way to do this, but it is not very intuitive. It depends on the byrow setting in the legend guide, whether the legend spacing is respected or not (don't ask me why!).

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(dplyr::filter(msleep, grepl("^C", order)), 
            aes(sleep_total, sleep_rem, color = order)) +
  geom_line(na.rm = TRUE) +
  guides(
    color = guide_legend(byrow = TRUE)
  ) +
  theme(legend.key = element_rect(color = "black"),
        legend.spacing.y = unit(1, "cm"))

^{Created on 2021-12-30 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)}

I've complained raised the suggestion that this is unintuitive elsewhere.

If you want the title to be in a relatively normal position, you can use the following incantation to the theme function, wherein 11 pt is the default legend spacing:

legend.title = element_text(
  margin = margin(
  b = -1 + grid::convertUnit(unit(11, "pt"), "cm", valueOnly = TRUE), 
  unit = "cm")
)

Vertical spacing legend without changing key height

Something like this? I modified the legend.key as well. You could place the legend on top and not worry about the space anymore.

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = mpg, y = disp, color = as.factor(gear))) +
  geom_point() +
  theme(legend.key = element_rect(size = 6),
        legend.key.height = unit(1, "cm"),
        legend.key.width = unit(1, "cm"))

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