R graphs: Creating Tufte's horizontal bar lines

20
votes

How can we replicate Tufte's implicit horizontal lines in R?

Tufte bars

For example, the following is a good starting point:

library(ggplot2)    
ggplot(msleep, aes(x=order)) + stat_bin() + theme_bw()

Removing the border line should be straightforward. The crucial point, overlaying the horizontal line with the bars, is unclear to me.

I imagine two approaches here:

  1. Ad-hoc solution for this particular example
  2. Suggestion how to incorporate it into a theme
3
rgraphggplot2
I think this question is much better phrased, so I vote for not closing. – Andrie
I think the main problem is the title is exactly the same as the proposed duplicate. I suggest that a difference i.e. (The exact case) should be able to be distilled down to a form representable in the title. If they are different enough, the title of each should reflect the specificity. – krock
@Andrie, Yeah I agree with you but I think a mod reopened this so it's a moot point. My goal was more so to link the two posts so I will go there and link back to here. kroch is correct that the title is the issue. An addition of "in ggplot2" at the end would differentiate the two even more so. – Tyler Rinker
Link to related base question: stackoverflow.com/questions/9527802/… – Tyler Rinker

3 Answers

12
votes

Not a big addition to @Andrie answer, but you can take an advantage of the package ggthemes to make Tufte-sque plots with ggplot2. Below, I'm using theme_tufte, change the font using extrafont package, and use opts to fine-tune all the other visual features:

library(ggthemes)
library(extrafont)
ggplot(msleep, aes(x=order)) + stat_bin(width=0.6, fill="gray") + 
  theme_tufte(base_family="GillSans", base_size=16, ticks=F) +
  theme(axis.line=element_blank(), axis.text.x=element_blank(),
        axis.title=element_blank()) +
  geom_hline(yintercept=seq(5, 20, 5), col="white", lwd=1.2)

enter image description here

18
votes

In principle, this is straightforward - all you need to do is draw white horizontal lines in a new layer. You can use geom_hline to do this:

library(ggplot2)    
ggplot(msleep, aes(x=order)) + stat_bin() + theme_bw() +
  geom_hline(yintercept=seq(5, 20, 5), col="white")

enter image description here

As for your second question - I'd imagine this may be hard to incorporate in a theme, although it should be possible to create a custom geom that reads the y-scale breaks and plot the lines correspondingly.

(I'd love to be proved wrong.)

3
votes

There's also a pretty easy base R solution for this:

tmp <- table(msleep$order)
barplot(tmp, col='black', las=3)
abline(h=seq(5, max(tmp), by=5), col='white', lwd=2)

enter image description here