Editing legend (text) labels in ggplot

Question

I have spent hours looking in the documentation and on StackOverflow, but no solution seems to solve my problem. When using ggplot I can't get the right text in the legend, even though it's in my dataframe. I have tried scale_colour_manual , scale_fill_manual with different values for labels= such as c("T999", "T888")", "cols" .

Here is my code:

T999 <- runif(10, 100, 200)
T888 <- runif(10, 200, 300)
TY <- runif(10, 20, 30)
df <- data.frame(T999, T888, TY)


ggplot(data = df, aes(x=T999, y=TY, pointtype="T999")) + 
       geom_point(size = 15, colour = "darkblue") + 
       geom_point(data = df, aes(x=T888, y=TY), colour = 'red', size = 10 ) + 
       theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size = 20), axis.title.x =element_text(size = 20),   axis.text.y = element_text(size = 20)) +
       xlab("Txxx") + ylab("TY [°C]") + labs(title="temperatures", size = 15) + 
       scale_colour_manual(labels = c("T999", "T888"), values = c("darkblue", "red")) +    theme(legend.position="topright")

Help would be very appreciated!

Answer 1

The tutorial @Henrik mentioned is an excellent resource for learning how to create plots with the ggplot2 package.

An example with your data:

# transforming the data from wide to long
library(reshape2)
dfm <- melt(df, id = "TY")

# creating a scatterplot
ggplot(data = dfm, aes(x = TY, y = value, color = variable)) + 
  geom_point(size=5) +
  labs(title = "Temperatures\n", x = "TY [°C]", y = "Txxx", color = "Legend Title\n") +
  scale_color_manual(labels = c("T999", "T888"), values = c("blue", "red")) +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size = 14), axis.title.x = element_text(size = 16),
        axis.text.y = element_text(size = 14), axis.title.y = element_text(size = 16),
        plot.title = element_text(size = 20, face = "bold", color = "darkgreen"))

this results in:

As mentioned by @user2739472 in the comments: If you only want to change the legend text labels and not the colours from ggplot's default palette, you can use scale_color_hue(labels = c("T999", "T888")) instead of scale_color_manual() .

Answer 2

The legend titles can be labeled by specific aesthetic .

This can be achieved using the guides() or labs() functions from ggplot2 (more here and here ). It allows you to add guide/legend properties using the aesthetic mapping.

Here's an example using the mtcars data set and labs() :

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=mpg, y=disp, size=hp, col=as.factor(cyl), shape=as.factor(gear))) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(x="miles per gallon", y="displacement", size="horsepower", 
       col="# of cylinders", shape="# of gears")

Answering the OP's question using guides() :

# transforming the data from wide to long
require(reshape2)
dfm <- melt(df, id="TY")

# creating a scatterplot
ggplot(data = dfm, aes(x=TY, y=value, color=variable)) + 
  geom_point(size=5) +
  labs(title="Temperatures\n", x="TY [°C]", y="Txxx") +
  scale_color_manual(labels = c("T999", "T888"), values = c("blue", "red")) +
  theme_bw() +
  guides(color=guide_legend("my title"))  # add guide properties by aesthetic