How to install and use the hexSticker package

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 libfftw3-dev libtiff5-dev

R packages required

Recently, the fftwtools package was added to CRAN. Thus, it can be installed the usual way:

installed.packages('fftwtools', dep = TRUE)

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?