How to preview plots at specific dimensions in RStudio

If you've ever saved plots made in ggplot to a file, you've probably noticed that the dimensions of your plots you saw in RStudio does not correspond to their dimensions outside of RStudio. I recently learned a tip from Nicola Rennie for how to deal with this. Using the ggrecord() function from the camcorder package, you can preview plots in RStudio so that they have the exact same dimensions as when you save them with ggsave().

Code shown in video

library(tidyverse)
library(palmerpenguins)

penguins |>
  count(island) |> 
  ggplot(
    aes(
      x = island,
      y = n
    )
  ) +
  geom_col()

ggsave(
  filename = "penguins-by-island.png",
  width = 4,
  height = 8,
  unit = "in"
)

library(camcorder)

gg_record(
  device = "png",
  width = 4,
  height = 8,
  unit = "in"
)

penguins |>
  count(island) |> 
  ggplot(
    aes(
      x = island,
      y = n
    )
  ) +
  geom_col()

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By David Keyes

September 12, 2024

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