ggsave: Save a ggplot (or other grid object) with sensible defaults

Description

ggsave() is a convenient function for saving a plot. It defaults to saving the last plot that you displayed, using the size of the current graphics device. It also guesses the type of graphics device from the extension.

Usage

ggsave(
  filename,
  plot = last_plot(),
  device = NULL,
  path = NULL,
  scale = 1,
  width = NA,
  height = NA,
  units = c("in", "cm", "mm", "px"),
  dpi = 300,
  limitsize = TRUE,
  bg = NULL,
  create.dir = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

filename: File name to create on disk.
plot: Plot to save, defaults to last plot displayed.
device: Device to use. Can either be a device function (e.g. png), or one of "eps", "ps", "tex" (pictex), "pdf", "jpeg", "tiff", "png", "bmp", "svg" or "wmf" (windows only). If NULL (default), the device is guessed based on the filename extension.
path: Path of the directory to save plot to: path and filename are combined to create the fully qualified file name. Defaults to the working directory.
scale: Multiplicative scaling factor.
width, height: Plot size in units expressed by the units argument. If not supplied, uses the size of the current graphics device.
units: One of the following units in which the width and height arguments are expressed: "in", "cm", "mm" or "px".
dpi: Plot resolution. Also accepts a string input: "retina" (320), "print" (300), or "screen" (72). Applies only to raster output types.
limitsize: When TRUE (the default), ggsave() will not save images larger than 50x50 inches, to prevent the common error of specifying dimensions in pixels.
bg: Background colour. If NULL, uses the plot.background fill value from the plot theme.
create.dir: Whether to create new directories if a non-existing directory is specified in the filename or path (TRUE) or return an error (FALSE, default). If FALSE and run in an interactive session, a prompt will appear asking to create a new directory when necessary.
...: Other arguments passed on to the graphics device function, as specified by device.

Saving images without ggsave()

In most cases ggsave() is the simplest way to save your plot, but sometimes you may wish to save the plot by writing directly to a graphics device. To do this, you can open a regular R graphics device such as png() or pdf(), print the plot, and then close the device using dev.off(). This technique is illustrated in the examples section.

Details

Note: Filenames with page numbers can be generated by including a C integer format expression, such as %03d (as in the default file name for most R graphics devices, see e.g. png()). Thus, filename = "figure%03d.png" will produce successive filenames figure001.png, figure002.png, figure003.png, etc. To write a filename containing the % sign, use %%. For example, filename = "figure-100%%.png" will produce the filename figure-100%.png.

Examples

Run this code

if (FALSE) {
ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
  geom_point()

# here, the device is inferred from the filename extension
ggsave("mtcars.pdf")
ggsave("mtcars.png")

# setting dimensions of the plot
ggsave("mtcars.pdf", width = 4, height = 4)
ggsave("mtcars.pdf", width = 20, height = 20, units = "cm")

# passing device-specific arguments to '...'
ggsave("mtcars.pdf", colormodel = "cmyk")

# delete files with base::unlink()
unlink("mtcars.pdf")
unlink("mtcars.png")

# specify device when saving to a file with unknown extension
# (for example a server supplied temporary file)
file <- tempfile()
ggsave(file, device = "pdf")
unlink(file)

# save plot to file without using ggsave
p <-
  ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
  geom_point()
png("mtcars.png")
print(p)
dev.off()

}

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