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

You could do this with the Plotly R API, with either code, or from the GUI by dragging the legend where you want it.

Here is an example. The graph and code are also here.

x = c(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) 
y = c(0,3,6,4,5,2,3,5,4) 
x2 = c(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) 
y2 = c(0,4,7,8,3,6,3,3,4)

You can position the legend outside of the graph by assigning one of the x and y values to either 100 or -100.

legendstyle = list("x"=100, "y"=1)
layoutstyle = list(legend=legendstyle)

Here are the other options:

• list("x" = 100, "y" = 0) for Outside Right Bottom
• list("x" = 100, "y"= 1) Outside Right Top
• list("x" = 100, "y" = .5) Outside Right Middle
• list("x" = 0, "y" = -100) Under Left
• list("x" = 0.5, "y" = -100) Under Center
• list("x" = 1, "y" = -100) Under Right

Then the response.

response = p$plotly(x,y,x2,y2, kwargs=list(layout=layoutstyle));

Plotly returns a URL with your graph when you make a call. You can access that more quickly by calling browseURL(response$url) so it will open your graph in your browser for you.

url = response$url
filename = response$filename

That gives us this graph. You can also move the legend from within the GUI and then the graph will scale accordingly. Full disclosure: I'm on the Plotly team.