Plot a legend outside of the plotting area in base graphics?

Question

As the title says: How can I plot a legend outside the plotting area when using base graphics?

I thought about fiddling around with layout

Answer 1

Adding another simple alternative that is quite elegant in my opinion.

Your plot:

plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, type = "o", ylim=c(-2,2))
lines(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 2, lty = 2, type="o")

Legend:

legend("bottomright", c("group A", "group B"), pch=c(1,2), lty=c(1,2),
       inset=c(0,1), xpd=TRUE, horiz=TRUE, bty="n"
       )

Result:

Here only the second line of the legend was added to your example. In turn:

• inset=c(0,1) - moves the legend by fraction of plot region in (x,y) directions. In this case the legend is at "bottomright" position. It is moved by 0 plotting regions in x direction (so stays at "right") and by 1 plotting region in y direction (from bottom to top). And it so happens that it appears right above the plot.
• xpd=TRUE - let's the legend appear outside of plotting region.
• horiz=TRUE - instructs to produce a horizontal legend.
• bty="n" - a style detail to get rid of legend bounding box.

Same applies when adding legend to the side:

par(mar=c(5,4,2,6))
plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, type = "o", ylim=c(-2,2))
lines(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 2, lty = 2, type="o")

legend("topleft", c("group A", "group B"), pch=c(1,2), lty=c(1,2),
       inset=c(1,0), xpd=TRUE, bty="n"
       )

Here we simply adjusted legend positions and added additional margin space to the right side of the plot. Result: