New theme arguments

[ptoche]

The theme() function has a few new arguments, a couple of which may be worth adding to ggthemes. I'm thinking about plot.subtitle and plot.caption

Something for the to-do list perhaps...

[ptoche]

I'm getting an error with theme_stata that I didn't get before:

Error in if (theme$panel.ontop) { : argument is of length zero

Is this panel.ontop a new argument? [EDIT: 2 months later, cannot reproduce the error]

Also (not sure if that's new), the theme economist gives an ugly horizontal line at the horizontal axis with overlapping labels for:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = cyl)) + geom_bar()

Also, for the economist theme, axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 1,... works better for numbers along the vertical axis, while axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 0,... works well for strings. I have checked that indeed that is how The Economist does it. This suggests setting hjust with a conditional on whether the labels are numeric or character/factor...

Quickly tested the following: "theme_base", "theme_calc", "theme_economist", "theme_excel", "theme_few", "theme_fivethirtyeight", "theme_gdocs", "theme_hc", "theme_par", "theme_pander", "theme_solarized", "theme_stata", "theme_tufte", "theme_wsj"

[jrnold]

I can't reproduce the error: error in if (theme$panel.ontop) { : argument is of length zero. Can you provide more info?

[jrnold]

Since the theme is independent of the data, it would be hard to directly include that condition. I could maybe add an arg that would set hjust to 0 or 1; it wouldn't be that much more convenient than manually setting it with theme, but would act like documentation as much as anything.

[jrnold]

I don't have any real plans for adding those new args for themes in the near future. If you find the settings that work well for a particular theme, I'd love a pull request.

[jrnold]

Also (not sure if that's new), the theme economist gives an ugly horizontal line at the horizontal axis with overlapping labels for:

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. The horizontal line is part of the theme; probably not the best for a bar chart, but that's what additional customization can be used for.

[ptoche]

The Economist's theme with the "ugly" (quote) horizontal bar was the result of setting axis.text.x to NULL, which obviously wasn't a smart thing to do (I seem to remember setting axis.text.x to NULL as a workaround of some sort, perhaps no longer needed in recent versions of ggplot2):

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = cyl)) + geom_bar() + theme_economist() + theme(axis.text.x = NULL)

[ptoche]

Further info about the hjust comment:

ggplot(data = mtcars[c(1:8),], aes(x = mpg, y = row.names(mtcars)[1:8])) + geom_point() + 
    theme_economist() + theme(axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 1))

versus

ggplot(data = mtcars[c(1:8),], aes(x = mpg, y = row.names(mtcars)[1:8])) + geom_point() + 
    theme_economist() + theme(axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 0))

[ptoche]

Another comment in passing, the Stata theme doesn't work well with long labels on the y-axis. Stata provides the angle(h) option to set the labels to horizontal, which can be obtained with theme(axis.text.y = element_text(angle = 0)). Perhaps a one-liner you can add to the readme file. Just a thought.

[jrnold]

Those examples seem to be cases where the user has to do some additional formatting to polish the plot using the theme function. That's the case in many plots. I don't see anything about these particular examples that's much different than the typical workflow with plots.

[ptoche]

You're right, so I closed the issue.