First off, I tried experimenting with different versions of your current attempt as well as using theme(legend.text = element_text(color = c("red","blue","green"))) but none of the above worked so I had to go to gtables.
What you want is possible, but requires you to be very familiar with gtables and the gtable package. This is going to look very messy because there are a lot of nested lists and the object we ultimately want to modify is at the bottom of one. Just bear with me:
library(ggplot2)
library(gtable)
library(grid)
pGrob <- ggplotGrob(ggplot(data=PlantGrowth, aes(x=group, y=weight, fill=group)) +
geom_boxplot() +
scale_fill_discrete(guide=guide_legend(label.theme=element_text(angle=0,
size=9))))
gb <- which(grepl("guide-box", pGrob$layout$name))
gb2 <- which(grepl("guides", pGrob$grobs[[gb]]$layout$name))
label_text <- which(grepl("label",pGrob$grobs[[gb]]$grobs[[gb2]]$layout$name))
pGrob$grobs[[gb]]$grobs[[gb2]]$grobs[label_text] <- mapply(FUN = function(x, y) {x$gp$col <- y; return(x)},
x = pGrob$grobs[[gb]]$grobs[[gb2]]$grobs[label_text],
y = c("red", "green", "blue"), SIMPLIFY = FALSE)
grid.draw(pGrob)
The first 3 lines that create gb, gb2, and label_text are all designed to dynamically get to that bottom level we want to modify. Once we have our path to get the objects, we can then modify them using the mapply and change the col to be the vector you want.
