Apparently, folk have figured out how to make xkcd style graphs in Mathematica and in LaTeX. Can we do it in R? Ggplot2-ers? A geom_xkcd and/or theme_xkcd?
I guess i
Here's an attempt at the fonts, based on links from the xkcd forums and the extrafont
package:
As noted above there is a forum discussion about fonts on the xkcd site: I grabbed the first one I could find, there may be other (better?) options (@jebyrnes posts another source for possible fonts in comments above -- the TTF file is here; someone reported a 404 error for that source, you might alternatively try here or here, substituting those URLs appropriately for xkcdFontURL
below; you may have to work a bit harder to retrieve the Github-posted links)
xkcdFontURL <- "http://simonsoftware.se/other/xkcd.ttf"
download.file(xkcdFontURL,dest="xkcd.ttf",mode="wb")
(This is for quickie, one-off use: for regular use you should put it in some standard system font directory.)
library(extrafont)
The most useful information about fonts was on the extrafont github site -- this is taken from there
font_import(".") ## because we downloaded to working directory
loadfonts()
Example taken more or less verbatim from the github site:
library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) + geom_point() +
ggtitle("Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars") +
xlab("Weight (x1000 lb)") + ylab("Miles per Gallon") +
theme(text=element_text(size=16, family="xkcd"))
ggsave("xkcd_ggplot.pdf", plot=p, width=4, height=4)
## needed for Windows:
## Sys.setenv(R_GSCMD = "C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.05/bin/gswin32c.exe")
embed_fonts("xkcd_ggplot.pdf")
Thinking along the same line as some of the other answers, I've "un-ggplotted" the chart and also added on the flexibility of the x-axis label locations (which seems to be common in xkcd) and an arbitrary label on the chart.
Note that I had a few issues with loading the Humor Sans font and manually downloaded it to working directory.
And the code...
library(ggplot2)
library(extrafont)
### Already have read in fonts (see previous answer on how to do this)
loadfonts()
### Set up the trial dataset
data <- NULL
data$x <- seq(1, 10, 0.1)
data$y1 <- sin(data$x)
data$y2 <- cos(data$x)
data$xaxis <- -1.5
data <- as.data.frame(data)
### XKCD theme
theme_xkcd <- theme(
panel.background = element_rect(fill="white"),
axis.ticks = element_line(colour=NA),
panel.grid = element_line(colour="white"),
axis.text.y = element_text(colour=NA),
axis.text.x = element_text(colour="black"),
text = element_text(size=16, family="Humor Sans")
)
### Plot the chart
p <- ggplot(data=data, aes(x=x, y=y1))+
geom_line(aes(y=y2), position="jitter")+
geom_line(colour="white", size=3, position="jitter")+
geom_line(colour="red", size=1, position="jitter")+
geom_text(family="Humor Sans", x=6, y=-1.2, label="A SIN AND COS CURVE")+
geom_line(aes(y=xaxis), position = position_jitter(h = 0.005), colour="black")+
scale_x_continuous(breaks=c(2, 5, 6, 9),
labels = c("YARD", "STEPS", "DOOR", "INSIDE"))+labs(x="", y="")+
theme_xkcd
ggsave("xkcd_ggplot.jpg", plot=p, width=8, height=5)
Here is my take on the lines with ggplot2
using some of the code from above:
ggplot()+geom_line(aes(x=seq(0,1,length.out=1000),y=sin(x)),position=position_jitter(width=0.02),lwd=1.5,col="white")+
geom_line(aes(x=seq(0,1,length.out=1000),y=sin(x)),position=position_jitter(width=0.004),lwd=1.4,col="red")+
geom_line(aes(x=seq(0,1,length.out=1000),y=cos(x)),position=position_jitter(width=0.02),lwd=1.5,col="white")+
geom_line(aes(x=seq(0,1,length.out=1000),y=cos(x)),position=position_jitter(width=0.004),lwd=1.4,col="blue")+
theme_bw()+theme(panel.grid.major=element_blank(),panel.grid.minor=element_blank())
Not sure how to replace the axes, but could use the same approach with jitter
. Then it's a matter of importing the font from XKCD and layering with geom_text
.
You might want to consider the following package:
Package xkcd: Plotting ggplot2 graphics in a XKCD style.
library(xkcd)
vignette("xkcd-intro")
Some examples (Scatterplots, Bar Charts):
Basic line-drawing function:
xkcd_line <- function(x, y, color) {
len <- length(x);
rg <- par("usr");
yjitter <- (rg[4] - rg[3]) / 1000;
xjitter <- (rg[2] - rg[1]) / 1000;
x_mod <- x + rnorm(len) * xjitter;
y_mod <- y + rnorm(len) * yjitter;
lines(x_mod, y_mod, col='white', lwd=10);
lines(x_mod, y_mod, col=color, lwd=5);
}
Basic axis:
xkcd_axis <- function() {
rg <- par("usr");
yaxis <- 1:100 / 100 * (rg[4] - rg[3]) + rg[3];
xaxis <- 1:100 / 100 * (rg[2] - rg[1]) + rg[1];
xkcd_line(1:100 * 0 + rg[1] + (rg[2]-rg[1])/100, yaxis,'black')
xkcd_line(xaxis, 1:100 * 0 + rg[3] + (rg[4]-rg[3])/100, 'black')
}
And sample code:
data <- data.frame(x=1:100)
data$one <- exp(-((data$x - 50)/10)^2)
data$two <- sin(data$x/10)
plot.new()
plot.window(
c(min(data$x),max(data$x)),
c(min(c(data$one,data$two)),max(c(data$one,data$two))))
xkcd_axis()
xkcd_line(data$x, data$one, 'red')
xkcd_line(data$x, data$two, 'blue')
Produces:
This is a very, very rough start and only covers (partially) the hand-drawn look and feel of the lines. It would take a little bit of work to automate this but adding some AR(1) noise to the response function could make it seem slightly hand drawn
set.seed(551)
x <- seq(0, 1, length.out = 1000)
y <- sin(x)
imperfect <- arima.sim(n = length(y), model = list(ar = c(.9999)))
imperfect <- scale(imperfect)
z <- y + imperfect*.005
plot(x, z, type = "l", col = "blue", lwd = 2)