bar chart second logical limit

[EvaMaeRey]

Sometimes there's discussion about starting bar charts at zero. Another logical limit could be the max hypothetical count - so y axis starts at 0 and ends a the number of observations. A common upper limit can be nice in ensembles so that bar lengths are comparable across plots.

I think the standard way to do this would be to enter limits = c(0, nrow(data)) manually in scale_y_continuous() for vertical bar chart for example. Another way could be to define a layer geom_bar_maxlimit created with GeomBlank and a Stat that has the data$y <- nrow(data)... Other ways?

[teunbrand]

enter limits = c(0, nrow(data)) manually in scale_y_continuous()

This is the way. I'm not a fan of geom_blank() and by similarity expand_limits(). I think especially expand_limits() is antigrammatical (agramattical?). @yjunechoe how do you call something that is not following the grammar of something? I'm not a linguist 😅

EDIT: extragrammatical? as in outside the grammar?

[teunbrand]

Nobody understands labeller. Everybody just edits the factor levels to get the panel titles right 🙃

[EvaMaeRey]

Yeah, I don't think the GeomBlank avenue would lead to something that feels intuitive. What is labeller?

And p1 + p2 + p3... & scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, nrows(survey)) could work (I think!) for the ensemble case if just bar charts included in patchwork ensemble, which is probably where I'm headed.

[EvaMaeRey]

I put some ideas in a 'ggpro' 😅 repo with working example geom_vbar(), where basic plot composition is like geom_bar(), but geom_vbar brings along theme_vbar, scale_x_vbar, and scale_y_vbar options.

diamonds |> 
  ggplot() + 
  aes(x = cut) + 
  geom_vbar() + 
  geom_vbar_label()

Then you can further adjust with components...

ggchalkboard:::theme_blackboard() |> theme_set()

last_plot() + 
  scale_y_vbar(yaxis_title = "diamonds", limits = c(0, nrow(diamonds)))

[EvaMaeRey]

Pretty sketchy, and probably a lot to think and work through, but I think this interface would be an interesting and more grammatical (?) alternative to wrapped up alternatives.

[EvaMaeRey]

So it's kind of interesting (maybe problematic for the whole exercise) that adding a 'global theme' (brand theme?) directly to the plot, of course produces different plots depending on where you add the declaration. Pretty subtle, but a lot fewer gridlines when geom_vbar comes after. It kind of feels like theme_vbar could be made to take precedent no matter where it falls.