Intro
A couple of days ago, the hexSticker package was published on CRAN. The package provides some functions to plot hexagon stickers that may be used to promote R packages. As described on GitHub, the stickers can be plotted either using base R's plotting function, the lattice package or the ggplot2 package. Moreover, it is also possible to plot image files.
Since I found it quite demanding to install the hexSticker package on a current Linux os (Linux Mint 18.1), I decided to write a short tutorial explaining how to install and use the package on Linux Ubuntu-based operating systems.
Linux packages required
In a first step, we need to open the terminal to install the following software packages. While texinfo is required to build R packages from source, libudunits2-dev, fftw-dev and mffm-fftw1 are needed to install some R packages the hexSticker package depends on (ggforce, fftwtools).
sudo apt-get install texinfo libudunits2-dev fftw-dev mffm-fftw1 libtiff5-dev
R packages required
Since the fftwtools package cannot be installed from any repository, it must be installed manually. The zip file can be downloaded from GitHub and must be unzipped.
wget https://github.com/aoles/fftwtools/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
In a next step, we move to the parent directory and build and install the package.
cd ..
R CMD build fftwtools-master
R CMD INSTALL fftwtools*.tar.gz
Finally, the EBImage package must be installed from the Bioconductor repository and the packages ggimage, ggforce and hexSticker must be installed from CRAN.
source("https://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("EBImage")
install.packages("ggimage")
install.packages("ggforce")
install.packages("hexSticker")
For plotting an example hexsticker we need some data provided by the streetsofle package which must be installed from GitHub:
if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("nrkoehler/streetsofle")
Plotting
With the following code chunk we create two hexstickers for the streetsofle package. The colours chosen stem from the city flag of Leipzig. The arguments of the sticker() function are explained within the code’s comments.
library(hexSticker)
library(ggplot2)
library(streetsofle)
data(streetsofle)
p.1 <- ggplot(aes(x = lon, y = lat), data = shape.ortsteile) +
theme_map_le() +
coord_quickmap() +
geom_polygon(aes(x = lon, y = lat, group = group),
fill = NA,
size = 0.2,
color = "#FFCB00") +
geom_polygon(aes(x = lon, y = lat, group = group),
color = "#FFCB00",
size = 1,
fill = NA,
data = shape.bezirke)
p.1 <- sticker(p.1,
package="streetsofle",
s_x = 1, # horizontal position of subplot
s_y = 1.1, # vertical position of subplot
s_width = 1.4, # width of subplot
s_height = 1.4, # height of subplot
p_x = 1, # horizontal position of font
p_y = .43, # vertical position of font
p_size = 6, # font size
p_color = "#FFCB00", # font colour
h_size = 3, # hexagon border size
h_fill = "#004CFF", # hexagon fill colour
h_color = "#FFCB00") # hexagon border colour
p.2 <- ggplot(aes(x = lon, y = lat), data = shape.ortsteile) +
theme_map_le() +
coord_quickmap() +
geom_polygon(aes(x = lon, y = lat, group = group),
fill = NA,
size = 0.2,
color = "#004CFF") +
geom_polygon(aes(x = lon, y = lat, group = group),
color = "#004CFF",
size = 1,
fill = NA,
data = shape.bezirke)
p.2 <- sticker(p.2,
package="streetsofle",
s_x = 1, # horizontal position of subplot
s_y = 1.1, # vertical position of subplot
s_width = 1.4, # width of subplot
s_height = 1.4, # height of subplot
p_x = 1, # horizontal position of font
p_y = .43, # vertical position of font
p_size = 6, # font size
p_color = "#004CFF", # font color
h_size = 3, # hexagon border size
h_fill = "#FFCB00", # hexagon fill colour
h_color = "#004CFF") # hexagon border colour
Finally, both plots are put into a grid layout using the grid.arrange() function of the gridExtra package.
library(gridExtra)
grid.arrange(p.1, p.2, ncol = 2, respect = TRUE)
I’m not sure which sticker looks better. What do you think?
