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rggplot2whitespace

How to get rid of whitespace in a ggplot2 plot?

I'm preparing a figure for a publication. I'm omitting the x label by setting xlab(""), however ggplot2 produces a whitespace instead of completely removing the label. How can I get rid of the whitespace (marked by red rectangle in the plot below)?

enter image description here

The full code:

ggplot(data, aes(x=Celltype, y=Mean, fill=factor(Dose), label=p.stars)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", position = position_dodge(width=0.9), aes(group=Dose)) +
  geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = Mean - SEM, ymax = Mean + SEM), stat = "identity", position = position_dodge(width=0.9), width=0.25) +
  geom_text(aes(y = Mean + SEM), size = 5, position = position_dodge(width=0.9), hjust = .5, vjust = -1) +
  xlab("") +
  ylab("Concentration") +
  scale_fill_grey(name = "Dose") +
  theme_bw()
Solution

  • Use theme() to remove space allocated for the x axis title. When you set xlab("") there is still space made for this title.

    + theme(axis.title.x=element_blank())