How to control ggplot's plotting area proportions instead of fitting them to devices in R?

Question

By default, each plot in ggplot fits its device.

That\'s not always desirable. For instance, one may need to make tiles in geom_tile to be

Answer 1

You can specify the aspect ratio of your plots using coord_fixed().

> library(ggplot2)
> df <- data.frame(
+     x = runif(100, 0, 5),
+     y = runif(100, 0, 5))

If we just go ahead and plot these data then we get a plot which conforms to the dimensions of the output device.

> ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point()

If, however, we use coord_fixed() then we get a plot with fixed aspect ratio (which, by default has x- and y-axes of same length). The size of the plot will be determined by the shortest dimension of the output device.

> ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() + coord_fixed()

Finally, we can adjust the fixed aspect ratio by specifying an argument to coord_fixed(), where the argument is the ratio of the length of the y-axis to the length of the x-axis. So, to get a plot that is twice as tall as it is wide, we would use:

> ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() + coord_fixed(2)