How To Plot With Patchwork

INTRODUCTION

**Please note** This tutorial is largely taken from the relevant package github page **Please note**

The package patchwork is beeing used to as a connector between different ggplots. More specifically it display them in one picture.
Installation
You can install patchwork from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("thomasp85/patchwork")

Its usage is quite straighforward if you already know the how to use ggplot2.
library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)

p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_point(aes(mpg, disp))
p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear))

p1 + p2

Of course it is not necessary to create 2 separate objects in order to use patchwork.

ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(mpg, disp)) +
ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear))

In order to adjust the settings of your layout you just need to use plot_layout().

p1 + p2 + plot_layout(ncol = 1, heights = c(3, 1))

The plot_spacer() is used if you want to add or remove space between your plots.

p1 + plot_spacer() + p2

A really useful feature that patchwork provides is that it enables the user to create “subplots”.

p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_smooth(aes(disp, qsec))
p4 <- ggplot(mtcars) + geom_bar(aes(carb))

p4 + {
p1 + {
p2 +
p3 +
plot_layout(ncol = 1)
}
} +
plot_layout(ncol = 1)

Advanced Features
What is interesting about patchwork is that you can use “+”, “-” operators in order to define the nesting level:

p1 + p2 + p3 + plot_layout(ncol = 1)

Look at the code below and notice that now pi and p2 are “nested-like”:

p1 + p2 - p3 + plot_layout(ncol = 1)

The next two operators that enable plot placing are | and / for horizontal and vertical layouts, respectively. You can use them in the same operation.

(p1 | p2 | p3) /
p4

Last but not least you can use & or * instead of having to set the layout settings for each separate plot. This is very useful feature especially if you need to combine many plots together. * alterate plots on the current nesting level:

(p1 + (p2 + p3) + p4 + plot_layout(ncol = 1)) * theme_bw()

while & :

p1 + (p2 + p3) + p4 + plot_layout(ncol = 1) & theme_bw()

Now, let’s move on to the first set of real exercises on the patchwork package!

Related exercise sets:

How To Plot With Patchwork: Exercises How to Display Multivariate Relationship Graphs With Lattice Spatial Data Analysis: Introduction to Raster Processing (Part 1) Lattice Exercises