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

A cleaner way is to use the theme(aspect.ratio) argument e.g.

library(ggplot2)
d <- data.frame(x=rnorm(100),y=rnorm(100)*1000)
ggplot(d,aes(x,y))+
geom_point() +
theme(aspect.ratio=1/10) #Long and skinny

coord_fixed() sets the ratio of x/y coordinates, which isn't always the same thing (e.g. in this case, where the units of x and y are very different.