How to adjust the gap between horizontal bars in R?

Question

How can I reduce the distance between horizontally placed bars in a chart? In this way, I will be able to save space in an article with a page limit. As an example, I prepared the following code and screenshot.

library(ggplot2)
survey <- data.frame(fruit=c("Apple", "Banana", "Grapes", "Kiwi", "Orange", "Pears"),
                     people=c(40, 50, 30, 15, 35, 20),tur=c("A","B","A","B","B","A"))
ggplot(survey, aes(x=fruit, y=people)) +
    geom_col(show.legend = FALSE,width = 0.5)+
  facet_wrap(~tur, ncol = 2,scales = "free")+
    coord_flip()

Answer 1

Maybe aspect.ratio can help?

I suspect the issue might be due to the plotting area of the device rather than ggplot, which seems to fill the device area.

With revised data using facet_wrap you are back to using aspect.ratio

ggplot(survey1, aes(x = fruit, y = people)) +
  geom_col(show.legend = FALSE, width = 0.9)+
  facet_wrap(~tur, ncol = 2, scales = "free")+
  coord_flip()+
  theme(aspect.ratio = 0.3)

Perhaps the issue is understanding how you transfer the plots into your article.

ggsave("skinny_plot.png", width = 150, height = 40, units = "mm")

ggsave("skinny_plot.pdf", width = 150, height = 40, units = "mm")

Which gives you:

data

survey1 <- data.frame(fruit=c("Apple", "Banana", "Grapes", "Kiwi", "Orange", "Pears"),
                     people=c(40, 50, 30, 15, 35, 20),
                     tur=c("A","B","A","B","B","A"))

^{Created on 2021-04-16 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)}