Legends of linetypes

Question

I am trying to make a boxplot and also add a legend to it:

boxplot(mpg~factor(gear),data=mtcars,par(las=2),range=0,col=rainbow(3))
abline(h=median(mtcars$mpg),lty=3)
abline(h=25,lty=6)
legend("bottomright",c("Median mileage","Mileage@25"),lty=c(3,6))

However, I am not being able to order the x-axis ticks. What do I do if I want to change the order to 4-3-5? Can you also show how to do this using ggplot2? My trial with ggplot2:

bp <- ggplot(mtcars,aes(x=gear,y=mpg))
order <- c(4,3,5)
bp+geom_boxplot(aes(colour=gear))+scale_x_discrete(limits=order)+geom_hline(yintercept=median(mtcars$mpg),linetype=2)+geom_hline(yintercept=25,linetype=8)

I am not being able to add the linetype legend in this case, however am able to change the order of the x-axis labels.

Answer 1

If you want to order your boxplots and have a discrete variable, you need to convert to factors:

library(ggplot2)
ord <- c(4,3,5)
md.mpg <- median(mtcars$mpg)
bp <- ggplot(mtcars,aes(x = as.factor(gear), y = mpg))
bp+geom_boxplot(aes(colour = as.factor(gear))) +
  scale_x_discrete(limits = as.factor(ord)) +
  geom_hline(yintercept = md.mpg, linetype = 2) +
  annotate("text", x = -Inf, y = md.mpg, label = sprintf("md = %.1f", md.mpg), vjust = -1.2, hjust = -0.2) +
  geom_hline(yintercept = 25,linetype = 8) +
  annotate("text", x = -Inf, y = 25, label = "value = 25", vjust = -1.2, hjust = -0.2)

In your example above, you have no different linetypes, at least none that are mapped to the data, so what kind of legend are you looking for?