Independent control over axis lines in 0.9.2

[Sandy Muspratt]

I'm not able to modify one or the other axis lines using version 0.9.2. 
Using the following base plot:

      library(ggplot2)
      (baseplot = ggplot(data.frame(x = 1:10, y = 1:10), aes(x,y)) + geom_point() )

I can modify both axis lines using:

     baseplot +  theme(axis.line = element_line(colour = "red", linetype = "dashed", size = 1))

But I can't modify the x axis line only using:

     baseplot + theme(axis.line.x = element_line(colour = "red", linetype = "dashed", size = 1))
 
The results appears to be the same as the base plot (i.e., no modification to the x axis line).  Am I doing something wrong?


> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252  
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                     
[5] LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252   

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base    

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_0.9.2

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.1-1   dichromat_1.2-4    digest_0.5.2       grid_2.15.1      
 [5] gtable_0.1.1       labeling_0.1       MASS_7.3-21        memoise_0.1      
 [9] munsell_0.3        plyr_1.7.1         proto_0.3-9.2      RColorBrewer_1.0-5
[13] reshape2_1.2.1     scales_0.2.2       stringr_0.6.1 

[Dennis Murphy]

Hi:

Because of the inheritance structure built into the new theming system, the way to do it is to modify axis.line and then use element_blank() on axis.line.y:

baseplot +  theme(axis.line = element_line(colour = "red", linetype = "dashed", size = 1),
                           axis.line.y = element_blank())

axis.line.x will inherit from axis.line and you'll get the behavior you expect.

Dennis

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[Sandy Muspratt]

Hi Dennis,
Thank you so much for you reply. You code works, but only if one axis line is to be modified and the other is to be removed.
But what if I want to modify both axis lines: x-axis line coloured red and y-axis line coloured blue. It seems I can't do that.

Version 0.9.2 gives me independent control over other x and y elements. For instance I can independently modify the tick marks:

      baseplot + theme(axis.ticks.x  = element_line(colour = "red", size = 2),
                       axis.ticks.y = element_line(colour = "blue", size = 2))

Or I can independently modify the grid lines:

      baseplot + theme(panel.grid.major.x = element_line(colour = "red", size = 1),
                       panel.grid.major.y = element_line(colour = "blue", size = 1))

But it seems the same style of code will not work to independently modify the axis lines:

      baseplot + theme(axis.line.x = element_line(colour = "red", size = 1),
                       axis.line.y = element_line(colour = "blue", size = 1))

Is there a way to apply different modifications to the axis lines?

Thanks
Sandy

[Winston Chang]

This is one area where the theme inheritance combined with the default
theme isn't an improvement on the old system...

The problem is that in the default theme_grey(), axis.line is set to
element_blank(), and the two elements that inherit from axis.line,
axis.line.x and axis.line.y, inherit the blank element. Perhaps it
would be a little easier the default for axis.line was this:
theme(axis.line = element_line(colour=NA))

At any rate, this should do the trick - you just need to set axis.line
to something that's not element_blank():

qplot(1:3, 1:3) +
theme(axis.line = element_line(),

axis.line.x = element_line(colour = "red", size = 1),
axis.line.y = element_line(colour = "blue", size = 1))

-Winston

[Sandy Muspratt]

Hi Winston,

Thanks for the reply. I think I understand now.  Also, I think the theme inheritance is a big improvement on the old system. In the old system, we had to use the grid package to get this sort of independent control over a few of the x and y elements. So I'm saying "Thank you, thank you, thank you".

Sandy