Legend keys from geom_sf in pdfs created using `ggsave` don't match what is displayed in the "Plots" window nor the output from RStudio's export

[francisko.rezende]

Hi peeps!

I hope y'all are safe

I'm having a super weird issue with ggsave and I was wondering if someone has faced (and hopefully solved) something similar.

Basically, the legends of pdfs I generate using ggsave do not match what is displayed in RStudio's "Plots" window nor the legends of pdfs I generate using RStudio's "Export" option. This is happening for maps created using geom_sf.

Here's an example:

library(rnaturalearth) # gets data
library(ggplot2) # plots map


world <-
  rnaturalearth::ne_countries(scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf") # creates a r object  called "world" with spatial data

ggplot2::ggplot(data = world) + #starts plot with "world" as its data
  geom_sf(aes(color = continent), show.legend = "point") # draws map with colored continent outlines

^{Created on 2020-04-10 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

As you can see, the map above has points as its legend key. That is the output I wanted to get, however, when I use ggsave("ggsave_test.pdf") to save the map as a pdf file this is what I get:

The weird thing is that this problem seems to be exclusive to ggsave since saving the plot using RStudio's "Export" functionality or knitting a Rmarkdown document result in the plot having points as its legend key.

I think this might be a macOS-specific issue (or even something that is happening only in my computer) because this problem doesn't happen in rstudio.cloud.

Does anybody know why this might be happening and how to solve this issue?

Here's my session info in case it's useful:

R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.4

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_3.3.0       rnaturalearth_0.1.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.4.6            compiler_3.6.3          pillar_1.4.3           
 [4] class_7.3-16            tools_3.6.3             digest_0.6.25          
 [7] evaluate_0.14           lifecycle_0.2.0         tibble_3.0.0           
[10] gtable_0.3.0            lattice_0.20-40         pkgconfig_2.0.3        
[13] rlang_0.4.5             DBI_1.1.0               cli_2.0.2              
[16] rstudioapi_0.11         yaml_2.2.1              xfun_0.12              
[19] rnaturalearthdata_0.1.0 e1071_1.7-3             withr_2.1.2            
[22] dplyr_0.8.5             knitr_1.28              rgeos_0.5-2            
[25] vctrs_0.2.4             tidyselect_1.0.0        classInt_0.4-2         
[28] grid_3.6.3              glue_1.3.2              sf_0.9-0               
[31] R6_2.4.1                fansi_0.4.1             rmarkdown_2.1          
[34] sp_1.4-1                farver_2.0.3            purrr_0.3.3            
[37] magrittr_1.5            scales_1.1.0            htmltools_0.4.0        
[40] ellipsis_0.3.0          units_0.6-6             assertthat_0.2.1       
[43] colorspace_1.4-1        KernSmooth_2.23-16      munsell_0.5.0          
[46] crayon_1.3.4  ```

Cheers and thanks in advance!

[mara]

That is indeed strange, couple questions:

• Does this happen regardless of the type of file you output in ggsave()?
• Does this happen if you give the plot a name, and save it using the plot argument? (This argument defaults to last_plot(); see ggsave() function reference for details).

If yes, I think you might need to go ahead and file this as an issue in the ggplot2 repo.

Issues · tidyverse/ggplot2

[francisko.rezende]

Hi Mara! Thanks for your help

So, about your questions:

Does this happen regardless of the type of file you output in ggsave()?

It seems so. I tried eps, ps, pdf, jpeg, tiff, png, bmp, and svg; all yield plots with the square legend keys.

Does this happen if you give the plot a name, and save it using the plot argument? (This argument defaults to last_plot() ; see ggsave() function reference for details).

Yes, it happens both when using the saved map as the argument for plot, and when leaving it blank (e.g., when it uses last_plot()).

I'll follow your suggestion and file this as an issue in ggplot's repo, thanks again

[mara]

Great! If you could just link to the issue here once you've done that, it will allow others to follow any progress/resolution.

Thanks

[francisko.rezende]

Will do!

As a matter of fact there's a development! I used purrr::walk to test the different file formats and the .eps file that was generated using the named map as ggsave()'s "plot" argument has the points in as its key! For some reason the plot generated from ggsave(filename = here::here("ggsave_no_loop.eps"), plot = map) has the squares though

Anyways, I'll link the issue here once I'm done writing it.

Thanks!

[francisko.rezende]

I followed @mara' s suggestion and opened an issue at ggplot's github repo, you can find it here.