Description

ggthemer is a Shiny module that adds graphical user interface (GUI) to control many theme elements of the ggplot2-generated plots.

Live version is available here (accessibility is subject to monthly allowance).

Installation

if (!require("devtools", quietly = T)) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("DzmitryGB/ggthemer")

Usage

ggthemer can be used directly via a wrapper function, ggthemerGUI, that runs a in-built Shiny app. There are several ways the function can be used. If no arguments is passed (e.g. ggthemerGUI()), the only element displayed on the page is the theme button. Close the browser window to quit. If ‘Apply’ button was pressed, the function will return theme component only.

my_theme <- ggthemerGUI() # don't forget to hit Apply
my_plot <- my_plot + ggthemerGUI()

Alternatively, passing a ggplot2 object to the function will also put the plot into the browser, so the applied changes can be seen immediately. Close the browser window to quit. The function will then return plot with the custom theme applied.

my_plot <- ggthemerGUI(my_plot)

Another way is to simply copy the code from the ‘R code’ tab and paste into your scripts.

To use ggthemer inside your own Shiny apps, two functions are provided, ggthemerUI and ggthemerSERV. Please refer to the documentation and the example app (found via system.file("ggthemerApp", package = "ggthemer")).

Extra fonts

ggthemer uses showtext package as a way to add extra fonts to the ggplot2 plots. The direct implementation is by passing a list object of locally available fonts as a parameter to the ggthemerUI function. The latter, in turn, uses sysfonts::font_add function to make the fonts available.

cached_fonts <- list(
    Roboto = list(
        family = "Roboto",
        regular = "fonts/Roboto-Regular.ttf",
        bold = "fonts/Roboto-Bold.ttf",
        italic = "fonts/Roboto-Italic.ttf",
        bolditalic = "fonts/Roboto-BoldItalic.ttf"
    )
)
ggthemerUI('myID', cached_fonts)

Persistence

Saved themes are automatically saved to a local user folder (determined by tools::R_user_dir("ggthemer")) so that they should be available during different sessions.

Screenshots