How to use Greek symbols in ggplot2?
RGraphicsUnicodeUtf 8Ggplot2R Problem Overview
My categories need to be named with Greek letters. I am using ggplot2
, and it works beautifully with the data. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to put those greek symbols on the x axis (at the tick marks) and also make them appear in the legend. Is there any way to do it?
UPDATE: I had a look at the link, however, there is no good method described to accomplish what I want to do.
R Solutions
Solution 1 - R
Here is a link to an excellent wiki that explains how to put greek symbols in ggplot2. In summary, here is what you do to obtain greek symbols
- Text Labels: Use
parse = T
insidegeom_text
orannotate
. - Axis Labels: Use
expression(alpha)
to get greek alpha. - Facet Labels: Use
labeller = label_parsed
insidefacet
. - Legend Labels: Use
bquote(alpha == .(value))
in legend label.
You can see detailed usage of these options in the link
EDIT. The objective of using greek symbols along the tick marks can be achieved as follows
require(ggplot2);
data(tips);
p0 = qplot(sex, data = tips, geom = 'bar');
p1 = p0 + scale_x_discrete(labels = c('Female' = expression(alpha),
'Male' = expression(beta)));
print(p1);
For complete documentation on the various symbols that are available when doing this and how to use them, see ?plotmath
.
Solution 2 - R
Simplest solution: Use Unicode Characters
No expression
or other packages needed.
Not sure if this is a newer feature for ggplot, but it works.
It also makes it easy to mix Greek and regular text (like adding '*' to the ticks)
Just use unicode characters within the text string. seems to work well for all options I can think of. Edit: previously it did not work in facet labels. This has apparently been fixed at some point.
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars,
aes(mpg, disp, color=factor(gear))) +
geom_point() +
labs(title="Title (\u03b1 \u03a9)", # works fine
x= "\u03b1 \u03a9 x-axis title", # works fine
y= "\u03b1 \u03a9 y-axis title", # works fine
color="\u03b1 \u03a9 Groups:") + # works fine
scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(10, 35, 5),
labels = paste0(seq(10, 35, 5), "\u03a9*")) + # works fine; to label the ticks
ggrepel::geom_text_repel(aes(label = paste(rownames(mtcars), "\u03a9*")), size =3) + # works fine
facet_grid(~paste0(gear, " Gears \u03a9"))
Created on 2019-08-28 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)
Solution 3 - R
Use expression(delta)
where 'delta' for lowercase δ
and 'Delta' to get capital Δ
.
Here's full list of Greek characters:
> Α α alpha
> Β β beta
> Γ γ gamma
> Δ δ delta
> Ε ε epsilon
> Ζ ζ zeta
> Η η eta
> Θ θ theta
> Ι ι iota
> Κ κ kappa
> Λ λ lambda
> Μ μ mu
> Ν ν nu
> Ξ ξ xi
> Ο ο omicron
> Π π pi
> Ρ ρ rho
> Σ σ sigma
> Τ τ tau
> Υ υ upsilon
> Φ φ phi
> Χ χ chi
> Ψ ψ psi
> Ω ω omega
EDIT: Copied from comments, when using in conjunction with other words use like: expression(Delta*"price")
Solution 4 - R
You do not need the latex2exp
package to do what you wanted to do. The following code would do the trick.
ggplot(smr, aes(Fuel.Rate, Eng.Speed.Ave., color=Eng.Speed.Max.)) +
geom_point() +
labs(title=expression("Fuel Efficiency"~(alpha*Omega)),
color=expression(alpha*Omega), x=expression(Delta~price))
Also, some comments (unanswered as of this point) asked about putting an asterisk (*) after a Greek letter. expression(alpha~"*")
works, so I suggest giving it a try.
More comments asked about getting Δ Price
and I find the most straightforward way to achieve that is expression(Delta~price))
. If you need to add something before the Greek letter, you can also do this:
expression(Indicative~Delta~price)
which gets you: