Increase number of axis ticks

Based on Daniel Krizian's comment, you can also use the pretty_breaks function from the scales library, which is imported automatically:

ggplot(dat, aes(x,y)) + geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = scales::pretty_breaks(n = 10)) +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = scales::pretty_breaks(n = 10))

All you have to do is insert the number of ticks wanted for n.

A slightly less useful solution (since you have to specify the data variable again), you can use the built-in pretty function:

ggplot(dat, aes(x,y)) + geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = pretty(dat$x, n = 10)) +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = pretty(dat$y, n = 10))

You can supply a function argument to scale, and ggplot will use that function to calculate the tick locations.

library(ggplot2)
dat <- data.frame(x = rnorm(100), y = rnorm(100))
number_ticks <- function(n) {function(limits) pretty(limits, n)}

ggplot(dat, aes(x,y)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=number_ticks(10)) +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=number_ticks(10))

You can override ggplots default scales by modifying scale_x_continuous and/or scale_y_continuous. For example:

library(ggplot2)
dat <- data.frame(x = rnorm(100), y = rnorm(100))

ggplot(dat, aes(x,y)) +
  geom_point()

Gives you this:

enter image description here

And overriding the scales can give you something like this:

ggplot(dat, aes(x,y)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = round(seq(min(dat$x), max(dat$x), by = 0.5),1)) +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = round(seq(min(dat$y), max(dat$y), by = 0.5),1))

enter image description here

If you want to simply "zoom" in on a specific part of a plot, look at xlim() and ylim() respectively. Good insight can also be found here to understand the other arguments as well.

Tags:

R

Ggplot2

Recent Posts