ggwaffle

Create waffle charts in R in a ggplot2-friendly way.

Acknowledgements

Really all credit to Bob Rudis for the work done on the original waffle package.

Description

ggwaffle is designed to work in a very similar way to the original waffle package, while being slightly closer to the workflow of a standard ggplot graphic. Consequently, it is a little more verbose.

Installation

Currently only available through github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("liamgilbey/ggwaffle")

Usage

ggwaffle heavily relies on the usage of ggplot2. Much like standard ggplot graphs, waffle charts are created by adding layers to a base graphic. Because of the inner mechanisms of ggplot2, some of the necessary data transformations have to be completed outside of a standard plot creation. The function waffle_iron has been added to help with issue.

ggwaffle also introduces a column mapping function, aes_d. At this stage I have no idea of how useful this is outside the context of the package, but it seemed a nice way to specifty dynamic column renamiing. aes_d is obviously coined from ggplot's aes function and has a very similar idea. Here we are mapping column names to feed into a function so they can be renamed for used appropriately.

library(ggwaffle)
waffle_data <- waffle_iron(mpg, aes_d(group = class))

ggplot(waffle_data, aes(x, y, fill = group)) + 
  geom_waffle()

Functions have also been included to make the default graphics more visually appealling. theme_waffle is a ggplot theme that strips back a lot of the elements of the waffle to create a cleaner look. scale_fill_waffle returns a discrete scale to make your charts look a lot like waffles. Using coord_equal is recommended to make the size of the blocks even in all dimensions.

iris$Species <- as.character(iris$Species)
waffle_data <- waffle_iron(iris, aes_d(group = Species))

ggplot(waffle_data, aes(x, y, fill = group)) + 
  geom_waffle() + 
  coord_equal() + 
  scale_fill_waffle() + 
  theme_waffle()

Icons

The best way to implement icons into waffle charts is to use Guangchuang YU's emojifont package.

library(emojifont)  
library(dplyr)

iris$Species <- as.character(iris$Species)
waffle_data <- waffle_iron(iris, aes_d(group = Species)) %>% mutate(label = fontawesome('fa-twitter'))

ggplot(waffle_data, aes(x, y, colour = group)) + 
  geom_text(aes(label=label), family='fontawesome-webfont', size=4) +
  coord_equal() + 
  scale_colour_waffle() + 
  theme_waffle()