Question

I am creating an application for various kinds of plot/chart drawing in Mathematica. Ultimately it will have a GUI, but the first step is to get the code right, and simple enough for a GUI to manage. I am having difficulty setting legends to have no frame around them.

Here is a minimal example (with some options on BarChart already customised using SetOptions.

mydata = {4.5644, 5.546, 6.8674, 2.7688, 1.742, 5.3952, 4.3392, 4.5016, \
 3.7748, 1.838, 2.24, 0.693, 2.818, 4.9, 3.939, 3.459, 3.755, 4.475, \
 3.857, 3.215, 2.206, 2.206, 2.117, 3.403, 3.277, 3.761, 4.276, 2.559, \
 3.486, 4.778, 2.281, 2.865, 3.629, 4.916, 4.572, 5.244, 5.395, 2.865, \
 -0.524, 5.01, 4.401, 4.513, 4.54}

BarChart[mydata, 
 ChartStyle -> {Join[
  Table[RGBColor[0.5, 0.5, 0.95], {Length[mydata] - 3}], {Magenta,
   Magenta, Magenta}]}, PlotRange -> {-2, 8}, 
 ChartLegends -> {Join[
  Table[None, {Length[mydata] - 3}], {Placed[
   Style["Forecasts", FontFamily -> "Arial", FontSize -> 18], 
   Bottom]}]}, BarSpacing -> 0.4, 
 LegendAppearance ->  Directive[Background -> Red, 
   Frame -> None, ImageSize -> 15]]

And here is what I get:

Try as I might, I can’t get rid of that border round the legend. You can see that LegendAppearance does nothing – I’ve tried a few other approaches to it, too.

I’m reticent to code up little rectangles by hand, because that will be very difficult to get right in the eventual GUI. ChartLabels won’t work either, because that is already being used for date labels in the real version of the graph.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can temporarily, globally kill the frame by setting:

SetOptions[Legending`GridLegend, Legending`LegendContainer -> Identity]

To restore the default behavior, set:

SetOptions[Legending`GridLegend, Legending`LegendContainer -> Automatic]