Removing White Spaces Between Facets When Using ggplotly()

Introduction

The ggplotly() function in R allows us to easily convert a ggplot object into an interactive plotly graph. However, one of the common issues users face when using ggplotly() is removing white spaces between facets. In this article, we will explore how to remove these extra white spaces and make your plot look neat and tidy.

Background

The problem arises from the default facet panel spacing in the ggplot2 package. The panel.spacing parameter controls the amount of space between each panel in a faceted plot. When we use ggplotly() on a faceted plot, it inherits this default spacing and introduces white spaces between facets.

Solution

To remove these extra white spaces, we can modify the panel.spacing parameter when creating our faceted plot using ggplot2. In this solution, we will show you how to adjust the panel spacing before converting the plot to an interactive graph with ggplotly().

Modifying Panel Spacing

We start by loading our required packages and creating a sample dataframe:

library(plotly)
library(ggplot2)
library(reshape2)

# Creating a sample dataframe
tips <- data.frame(tips = data.frame(total_bill = c(19.56, 10.34, 21.01, 17.02,
20.12, 24.59, 23.68, 15.88, 6.99, 9.98, 26.83, 16.49, 8.61),
                     tip = c(3.63, 4.35, 3.07, 7.52, 2.62, 5.43,
                            1.82, 6.99, 1.69, 2.46, 10.14, 3.41, 2.25),
                     day = c("Lunch", "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Lunch",
                             "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Dinner", "Lunch",
                             "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Lunch", "Breakfast",
                             "Dinner")),
            stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

# Creating a sample faceted plot
p <- ggplot(tips, aes(x=total_bill, y=tip/total_bill)) + 
  geom_point(shape=1) + 
  facet_wrap( ~ day, ncol=2)
  
ggplotly(p)

Adjusting Panel Spacing with theme()

As you can see in the above code snippet, we are using facet_wrap() to create a faceted plot. We then pass this plot to ggplotly(). Now, let’s modify the panel spacing by adding the theme() function.

library(plotly)
library(ggplot2)
library(reshape2)

# Creating a sample dataframe
tips <- data.frame(tips = data.frame(total_bill = c(19.56, 10.34, 21.01, 17.02,
20.12, 24.59, 23.68, 15.88, 6.99, 9.98, 26.83, 16.49, 8.61),
                     tip = c(3.63, 4.35, 3.07, 7.52, 2.62, 5.43,
                            1.82, 6.99, 1.69, 2.46, 10.14, 3.41, 2.25),
                     day = c("Lunch", "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Lunch",
                             "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Dinner", "Lunch",
                             "Breakfast", "Dinner", "Lunch", "Breakfast",
                             "Dinner")),
            stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

# Creating a sample faceted plot
p <- ggplot(tips, aes(x=total_bill, y=tip/total_bill)) + 
  geom_point(shape=1) + 
  theme(panel.spacing=unit(0,'npc'))+
  facet_wrap( ~ day, ncol=2)
  
ggplotly(p)

In the above code snippet, we added theme() and modified the panel.spacing parameter to unit(0,'npc'). This removes all white spaces between facets.

Conclusion

Removing white spaces between facets when using ggplotly() can be achieved by modifying the panel.spacing parameter in your faceted plot. By adding a small value of 0 to the ’npc’ (normalized printed characters) unit, you can easily remove these extra white spaces and make your interactive plot look neat and tidy.

This concludes our article on removing white spaces between facets when using ggplotly(). If you have any more questions or need further clarification, please feel free to ask.

Last modified on 2023-10-29