position legend of a stacked bar plot

Question

I am trying to create a stacked bar plot, but I cannot position the legend so that it does not overlap any of the bars. I have tried adjusting the margins, setting xl

Answer 1

How about this:

library(RColorBrewer)

barplot(
    y,
    xlim=c(0, ncol(y) + 3),
    col=brewer.pal(nrow(y), "Paired"),
    ylab="My Variables",
    legend.text=TRUE,
    args.legend=list(
      x=ncol(y) + 3,
      y=max(colSums(y)),
      bty = "n"
    )
)

Answer 2

You should add xpd=TRUE in par()

par(mfrow=.., mar=...,xpd=TRUE)

Answer 3

Just for fun, here it is in ggplot2, without overlapping legend.

set.seed(1234)
x <- replicate(8, round(10 * rexp(2000, 10)))
y <- apply(x, 2, function(column) table(factor(column, levels = 0:9)))
y <- as.data.frame(y)
colnames(y) <- paste('A', seq(1,ncol(y),1), sep='')
rownames(y) <- paste('R', seq(1,nrow(y),1), sep='')

library(ggplot2)
library(reshape)
y$ID <- rownames(y)
y.melt <- melt(y, id.var = 'ID')

y.melt <- within(y.melt, ID <- factor(ID, 
    c('R10','R9','R8','R7','R6','R5','R4','R3','R2','R1'), 
    ordered = TRUE))

ggplot(y.melt, aes(x = variable, y = value, fill = ID)) +
    geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
    xlab("") +
    ylab("My variable") +
    theme(legend.title=element_blank())

Answer 4

With margins

par(mfrow=c(1, 1), mar=c(5, 5, 4, 8))
barplot(y, col = 1:nrow(y), ylab="My Variables", legend.text = TRUE, 
        args.legend = list(x = "topright", bty = "n", inset=c(-0.15, 0)))