What are the default margins in ggplot’s theme_minimal() and theme_void()?

Turns out they are different, but you can easily tweak your code to get the same margins across all your graphs!

Author

Affiliation

Cara Thompson

Building Stories with Data

Today’s #rstats #ggplot discovery: the default margins.

• 🖼️ theme_minimal() uses margins 5.5 points all round
• ❌ theme_void() uses 0 lines

If you want them to match, use theme_void(), and have the same margins as with theme_minimal(), all you need to do is add + theme(plot.margins = margin(5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5)) to your plot code - the default unit is “pt”

Quick demo

Without tweaking the margins in theme_void(), the text goes right up to the edge of the graph.

library(ggplot2)

palmerpenguins::penguins |>
  ggplot(aes(x = bill_length_mm, y = flipper_length_mm, colour = species)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(
    title = "Perfectly Proportional Penguins",
    subtitle = "Ah, that's better!",
    caption = "Data from {palmerpenguins}"
  ) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(colour = "black", linewidth = 1)
  )

But there’s a very simple fix to replicate the margins we get from theme_minimal():

palmerpenguins::penguins |>
  ggplot(aes(x = bill_length_mm, y = flipper_length_mm, colour = species)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(
    title = "Perfectly Proportional Penguins",
    subtitle = "Ah, that's better!",
    caption = "Data from {palmerpenguins}"
  ) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(colour = "black", linewidth = 1),
    plot.margin = margin(5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5) # <- this!
  )

Tada!

P.S. I’m not recommending theme_void() for a scatterplot! This is just for illustration purposes!