Manual position of collected guides

[costavale]

I would like to be able to manually decide the position of the legend(s).
In the case of collected guides, and with a defined design it will be very useful to be able to manually put the legend in a blank space btw figures.

[thomasp85]

Have a look at guide_area() 🙂

[costavale]

Thank you! (....and what about the justification of the collected guides? thk)

[thomasp85]

These can be set in the patchwork theme

[MokeEire]

Is there a way to position the collected guides inside the plot area of one panel? The following naive attempt did not work:

p1 + p2 + 
    inset_element(guide_area(), left = 0.6, bottom = 0.6, right = 1, top = 1) +
    plot_layout(guides = "collect")

The way I was able to get the result I wanted was to set legend.position = "none" on the left panel and legend.position = c(.15, .9) on the right panel.

[jarbet]

I case anyone else is wondering, guide_area can also be used with wrap_plots:

suppressPackageStartupMessages({
    library(ggplot2)
    library(patchwork)
})
p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_point(aes(mpg, disp, colour = factor(gear)))
p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear))
p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_bar(aes(gear)) + facet_wrap(~cyl)

# Using guide_area() you can also designate an empty area for this
p1 + p2 + p3 + guide_area() + plot_layout(guides = 'collect')

### using wrap_plots:
plot_list <- list(
    p1,
    p2,
    p3,
    guide_area()
)
patchwork::wrap_plots(
    plot_list,
    ncol = 2,
    guides = 'collect'
)