Shift legend into empty facets of a faceted plot in ggplot2

Question

Consider the following plot:

library(ggplot2)

p <- ggplot(diamonds, 
            aes(x = carat, fill = cut)) +
  geom_density(position = \"stack\") +
  f         


        

Answer 1

Nice Q&A!

I found something similar at this link. So, I thought that it would have been a nice addition to your function.

More precisely the function reposition_legend() from lemon seems to be quite what you needed, except that it doesn't look for the empty spaces.

I took inspiration from your function to find the names of the empty panels that are passed to reposition_legend() with the panel arg.

Example data and libraries:

library(ggplot2)
library(gtable)
library(lemon)

p <- ggplot(diamonds, 
            aes(x = carat, fill = cut)) +
  geom_density(position = "stack") +
  facet_wrap(~ color) +
  theme(legend.direction = "horizontal")

Of course, I removed all the checks (if cases, which should be the same) just to concentrate on the important stuff.

shift_legend2 <- function(p) {
  # ...
  # to grob
  gp <- ggplotGrob(p)
  facet.panels <- grep("^panel", gp[["layout"]][["name"]])
  empty.facet.panels <- sapply(facet.panels, function(i) "zeroGrob" %in% class(gp[["grobs"]][[i]]))
  empty.facet.panels <- facet.panels[empty.facet.panels]

  # establish name of empty panels
  empty.facet.panels <- gp[["layout"]][empty.facet.panels, ]
  names <- empty.facet.panels$name
  # example of names:
  #[1] "panel-3-2" "panel-3-3"

# now we just need a simple call to reposition the legend
  reposition_legend(p, 'center', panel=names)
}

shift_legend2(p)

Note that this might still need some tweaking, I just thought it was something worth to be shared.

At the moment the behaviour seems OK, and the function is a few lines shorter.

---

Other cases.

First example:

p1 <- ggplot(economics_long, 
             aes(date, value, color = variable)) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_wrap(~ variable, 
             scales = "free_y", nrow = 2, 
             strip.position = "bottom") +
  theme(strip.background = element_blank(), 
        strip.placement = "outside")

shift_legend2(p1)

Second example:

p2 <- ggplot(mpg,
             aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = fl, shape = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  facet_wrap(~ class, dir = "v") +
  theme(legend.box = "horizontal")

#[1] "panel-2-3" "panel-3-3" are the names of empty panels in this case
shift_legend2(p2) 

Third example:

p3 <- ggplot(mtcars, 
             aes(x = factor(1), fill = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_bar(width = 1, position = "fill") + 
  facet_wrap(~ gear, nrow = 2) +
  coord_polar(theta = "y") +
  theme_void()
shift_legend2(p3)

---

Complete function:

shift_legend2 <- function(p) {
  # check if p is a valid object
  if(!(inherits(p, "gtable"))){
    if(inherits(p, "ggplot")){
      gp <- ggplotGrob(p) # convert to grob
    } else {
      message("This is neither a ggplot object nor a grob generated from ggplotGrob. Returning original plot.")
      return(p)
    }
  } else {
    gp <- p
  }

  # check for unfilled facet panels
  facet.panels <- grep("^panel", gp[["layout"]][["name"]])
  empty.facet.panels <- sapply(facet.panels, function(i) "zeroGrob" %in% class(gp[["grobs"]][[i]]), 
                               USE.NAMES = F)
  empty.facet.panels <- facet.panels[empty.facet.panels]

  if(length(empty.facet.panels) == 0){
    message("There are no unfilled facet panels to shift legend into. Returning original plot.")
    return(p)
  }

  # establish name of empty panels
  empty.facet.panels <- gp[["layout"]][empty.facet.panels, ]
  names <- empty.facet.panels$name

  # return repositioned legend
  reposition_legend(p, 'center', panel=names)
}