Quick start

The ggpattern package in R is an extension of the ggplot2 package, designed to add pattern aesthetics to your ggplot2 visualizations.

This package can be especially useful if you need to publish some black and white content.

# libs
library(ggplot2)
library(ggpattern)

# Create data
data <- data.frame(
  name=c("A","B","C","D","E") ,  
  value=c(3, 12, 5, 18, 45)
  )

# Barplot
ggplot(data, aes(x=name, y=value)) + 
  geom_col_pattern(
    aes(pattern_fill = name), 
    pattern = 'stripe',
    fill    = 'white',
    colour  = 'black'
  )

Installation

Getting started with ggpattern is straightforward.

First, ensure you have ggplot2 installed. Then, you can install ggpattern directly from CRAN using the install.packages function:

install.packages("ggpattern", repos = "https://cinc.rud.is")

Basic usage

The ggpattern package comes with a variety of pattern aesthetics that can be easily integrated into your ggplot2 visualizations.

Let’s take an example with the geom_col_pattern() aesthetics. It does pretty much the same task as the geom_col() aesthetics of ggplot2 that is used for bar charts.

But it adds options to use some patterns into rectangles.

The aesthetics comes with a number of options described in the next section. For each, you have to decide:

• if you want it to depend on a value of the dataset, put it inside the aes() call. Below, the color of the pattern is mapped to the name columnn since pattern_fill is in the aes() function.

• if you want it to be the same for all shapes, put it outside the aes() call. For instance, all bars will be using crosshatch below.

# Barplot
ggplot(data, aes(x=name, y=value)) + 
  geom_col_pattern(
    aes(pattern_fill = name), 
    pattern = 'crosshatch',
    fill    = 'white',
    colour  = 'black'
  )

Customization

It is possible to customize pretty much everything on the pattern you are building.

• colour and fill control the shape outline and the shape content colors.

• pattern controls the pattern type. It can be: ‘stripe’ (default), ‘crosshatch’, ‘point’, ‘circle’ or ‘none’

• pattern_alpha controls the pattern transparency

• pattern_angle controls the angle 🤷‍♀️

• pattern_colour and pattern_fill control the outline and fill colors

Type help(geom_col_pattern) to get some more details on all the available options!

# Bar chart using ggpattern with comments
ggplot(data, aes(x=name, y=value, fill= name)) + # Usual ggplot2 call, "name" for the x axis, "value" for the y axis
  geom_col_pattern(
    pattern = "circle",
    pattern_alpha = 0.8,
    pattern_fill = "white",
    pattern_colour  = '#69b3a2',
    pattern_size = 1.3
  )

Mapping pattern to data

You can map the pattern features to the data in use.

For instance, the following example use a very different look for each group of the dataset. To do so, the arguments described above are placed inside the aes() call:

# Bar chart using ggpattern with comments
ggplot(data, aes(x=name, y=value)) + # Usual ggplot2 call, "name" for the x axis, "value" for the y axis
  geom_col_pattern(
    aes(
      pattern_fill = name,
      fill= name,
      pattern = name,
    ),  
    colour  = 'black'
  )

Other aesthetics

Several other aesthetics are available, allowing to fill any kind of chart types with pattern. Names are always matching the original ggplot2 names.

To put it in a nutshell:

• geom_boxplot_pattern can be used for boxplot
• geom_density_pattern for density charts
• geom_map_pattern for maps
• geom_violin_pattern for violin charts

And many more are on the list. Here is an overview of other examples in the gallery using the ggpattern library:

Gallery of gtsummary examples

Textured black and white barplot

How to add textures into the bars of a barplot

Area chart with opaque gradient color

Color gradient in the area of an aread chart

Area chart with gradient color

Color gradient in the area of an aread chart with less opacity

Area chart with gradient color and data points

Color gradient in the area of an aread chart with less opacity and data points