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Save Plots

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Your Turn

Complete the save plots sections of the data-visualization-exercises.Rmd file.

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Saving Plots Resources

I have only showed you how to save plots by saving the last plot you made. You can also save a plot as an object and then use this object as an argument in your ggsave function. For more on doing that, see the relevant page from the Stat545 course by Jenny Bryan.

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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Catherine Roller White

Catherine Roller White

April 13, 2021

I was able to save this as a .png, but when I tried to save as a .pdf, I received this message:

Error in grid.Call.graphics(C_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, : invalid font type

It still created a .pdf, but the only text on the figure was the data labels (no title, axes, etc.) Perhaps we will be covering this on Thursday when we talk about fonts? Thank you.

David Keyes

David Keyes

April 13, 2021

Yes, this is a common thing, unfortunately. We can talk about it more on Thursday. Another thing you can try is the strategy in the Customize Your Fonts lesson in Going Deeper.

Lina Khan

I'm having the same issue as the above, when tried saving to pdf! Sounds like this might be covered in a future lesson?

David Keyes

David Keyes

October 8, 2021

Yes, it will be. Things have changed recently with regard to custom fonts. I also recorded this video for the Spring 2021 R in 3 Months cohort, which explains a bit about the best way to deal with custom fonts today.

Matt M

I'm on a windows machine and still had problems saving a pdf even after loading ragg and systemfonts. "Error in grid.Call.graphics(C_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, : invalid font type In addition: There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)"

When I change the theme away from ipsum to theme_light() I had no problems saving as a pdf.

David Keyes

David Keyes

October 11, 2021

When you use ggsave() can you try adding device = cairo_pdf as in this example:

ggsave("plot.png", device = cairo_pdf)

Let me know if that makes a difference (if so, I'll explain a bit more about why).

Abby Isaacson

Abby Isaacson

April 14, 2021

I saved without any errors, but I can't find it anywhere! Not in my files, nor the "plots" tab (what is that?).

David Keyes

David Keyes

April 14, 2021

Can you share your code so I can see it?

Abby Isaacson

Abby Isaacson

April 14, 2021

ggsave(filename = "plots/my-sleep-plot.png", height = 5, width = 8, units = "in")

David Keyes

David Keyes

April 15, 2021

Very weird! And you're sure you're working in a project, right?

Abby Isaacson

Abby Isaacson

April 15, 2021

OK, I found it in the fundamentals master folder from the class, under a new plots folder. However both my class exercises file and my class project file are saved under the same desktop folder pathway (Rin3mo), which Charlie mentioned in a real world might want to be saved separately. My class project is also having trouble saving my last plot (Error in grDevices::dev.off() : QuartzBitmap_Output - unable to open file 'plots/avg-mmr-by-type.png') - but I found it saved as "my-sleep-plot" (?) so something weird is going on.

Elan Sykes

My code for the facets section worked to get the right plot, and I wrote my saving code the same way the solutions suggest, but when I save the plot the background turns from white in the facets section original plot to dark grey in the png file. Is this something from the default? And how do I change individual elements of the plot while keeping the overall theme?

David Keyes

David Keyes

October 14, 2021

So I think what's happening is that the background is actually transparent and you're just seeing the dark grey being rendered on your computer. You can adjust this by tweaking your theme. You can learn a bit more about this in this lesson. tldr: use theme(plot.background = element_rect(fill = "white")) and it should (if my code is correct) make your background white.

Jeremy Danz

Jeremy Danz

February 4, 2023

I had the same issue as Elan, and this fix worked perfectly, thanks.

Andrew Paquin

Andrew Paquin

April 5, 2023

Hi David, I have encountered a problem during this lesson. Something is up with RStudio, and I can't put my finger on it. It had been working well, but suddenly it appears that tidyverse is unavailable to me. When I try to knit, I get the following:

Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tidyverse’: .onAttach failed in attachNamespace() for 'tidyverse', details: call: NULL error: package or namespace load failed for ‘ggplot2’ in loadNamespace(i, c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[i]]): namespace ‘rlang’ 1.0.6 is already loaded, but >= 1.1.0 is required

I've also been getting this a lot: In addition: Warning message: In gzfile(file, mode) : cannot open compressed file 'C:\Users\paquinan\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp4cUZ6h/libloc_185_13d200b7.rds', probable reason 'No such file or directory'

All of this started last night when I tried to access my html file for this section and realized that there isn't one.

Any ideas?

I have tried to run updates, and I see that there are six of them, but they don't take. I go through a perpetual cycle of being asked if I want R to restart. In the end, nothing changes. This ongoing cycle (being asked about restarting R, saying yes, being asked again...) is accompanied by repetitions of this message:

> install.packages(c("cli", "ggplot2", "htmltools", "ps", "rlang", "vctrs")) Error in install.packages : Updating loaded packages

Restarting R session...

Andrew Paquin

Andrew Paquin

April 5, 2023

With all my cutting and pasting, I see I put things out of order. The last section (starting at "I have tried to run updates" to "Restarting R session..." should come the "I've also been getting this a lot" section. Sorry about the confusion.

Melissa Mullins

Melissa Mullins

April 19, 2023

My plot looked great as a png even though I had overlapping text issues displaying in R studio. I wanted to see what they looked like if I knit, but I couldn't successfully do it. When it gets to this line of code install.packages("devtools") I get an error that says this: processing file: data-visualization-exercises.Rmd |....................................... | 77% (unnamed-chunk-19)Quitting from lines 276-279 (data-visualization-exercises.Rmd) Error in contrib.url(repos, "source") : trying to use CRAN without setting a mirror Calls: ... eval_with_user_handlers -> eval -> eval -> install.packages -> contrib.url

Execution halted

Suggestions appreciated!

David Keyes

David Keyes

April 19, 2023

Putting this here for anyone wondering: you should put install.packages("devtools") in the console (not in your RMarkdown document). Hope that helps!