Error: could not find function "unit"

Question

While trying to modify theme settings this simple code gives the following error:

library(ggplot2)
theme_nogrid <- theme_set(theme_update(  
                  plot.margin=unit(c(.25, .25, .25, .25), "in"),))

Error in do.call(theme, list(...)) : could not find function "unit"

R gives me this error for any element that uses 'unit'. Any other settings that do not call 'unit' work fine. I am running R v.2.15.2 (64-bit Windows).

I extensively searched online about this problem and found nothing. I appreciate any suggestions to the problem.

Same thing happens with lattice. Somebody ought to right an answer so it can get checked. It deserves to be "on the record". — IRTFM
Same thing happened with 'methods' too have a look: stackoverflow.com/questions/30266732/… Is it the case that the current version of ggplot (I work with 1.0.1) is importing some packages instead of loading them? I believe a comprehensive answer by someone with a knowledge of the inners of gglot should be in place. — Costas Bouyioukos

Ben Bolker Ben Bolker · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-14T23:07:24

This is closely related to, although not exactly identical to, arrow() in ggplot2 no longer supported , which says:

[the] grid [package] was loaded automatically by previous versions of ggplot[2] (making grid functions visible/accessible to the user); now it's referred to via NAMESPACE imports instead, so you need to explicitly load grid if you want to use grid functions (or [to] look at their help pages).

"explicitly load" here means library("grid") or require("grid") (grid is a base package, so doesn't need to be installed separately).

unit() is a function from the grid package, so the answer above (which was about arrow()) applies.

Alternatively you can specify grid::unit(...) or grid::arrow(...) without explicitly loading the entire package.

Error: could not find function "unit"

1 Answers