Increasing Whitespace Between Legend Items in Ggplot2

Increasing whitespace between legend items in ggplot2

One possible workaround is to add extra whitespace on the right of Categories using stringr::str_pad

library(ggplot2)

df <- data.frame("Categories" = rep(c("A", "B", "C"), 3),  
                 "values" = c(rep(0.39, 3), rep(0.37, 3), rep(0.24, 3)),
                 "X" = 1:9)

# define a custom function
str_pad_custom <- function(labels){
  new_labels <- stringr::str_pad(labels, 10, "right")
  return(new_labels)
}

ggplot(df, aes(x = X, y = values, colour = Categories)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_color_brewer(labels  = str_pad_custom,
                     palette = "Dark2") +
  theme(
    legend.position = "top",
    legend.key.width = unit(1.0,  unit = "cm"),
    legend.spacing.x = unit(0.25, unit = "cm"),
    legend.title = element_blank()
  ) 

^{Created on 2018-06-15 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).}

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

Change the vertical spacing of one legend in ggplot?

You can use the keyheight argument in guide_legend

ggplot(mtcars) +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(
    legend.position = c(0.8, 0.8),
    legend.direction = "horizontal",
    legend.key.size = unit(0.008, "cm"),
    legend.title = element_blank(),
    legend.margin = margin(),
    legend.spacing = unit(0.04, "cm")
  ) +
  guides(colour = guide_legend(override.aes = list(size = 6)),
         shape = guide_legend(override.aes = list(size = 5), keyheight = 2)) +
  geom_point(aes(x = mpg, y = cyl, colour = cyl)) +
  geom_point(aes(x = mpg, y = hp, shape = as.factor(carb)))

Spacing of Legend Items in ggplot

You can do this by specifying guide_legend(byrow = TRUE) before adding the spacing to your theme.

ggplot(iris) +
  geom_bar(aes(Species, fill = Sepal.Length.cut), stat = "count") +
  scale_fill_manual(values=iris.col, name = "increase space \n where indicated") +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(byrow = TRUE)) +
  theme(legend.spacing.y = unit(1.5, "lines"))

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")))

Space between gpplot2 horizontal legend elements

It really seems something like theme(legend.text = element_text(margin = margin(r = 2, unit = 'in'))) would be the right way to accomplish the task, but that doesn't do anything at all.

Instead, (and not for the first time) I fall back on the Microsoft Word style of alignment-hacking, i.e. just add spaces:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl), fill=factor(paste(cyl, '                    ')))) + 
    geom_bar() +
    coord_flip() +
    theme(legend.position = 'top') +
    guides(fill = guide_legend(title=NULL))

Because there's spaces on the 8 as well, it's a little off-center, but if you just paste them onto the previous labels you can nudge them around as you like.

Apologies for any nightmares caused to graphic designers.

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