Question

I’ve got a question concerning the creation of two plots in a row, using R with Package tikz device to send the tikz to Latex. What I want to do is, plotting 2 graphs in a row. What I did first was to create to plots in the par(mfrow=c(1,2)) ambiance. But this doesn’t work good, because the Plots are like vertical rectangles, when printing with Latex. What I want to have is to get two pictures in a row which are quadratic. So what I did next, I created a layout:

Layout<- matrix(c(1, 2), nrow = 1, ncol=2, byrow = TRUE)
nf <- layout(mat = Layout, widths = c(1,1),heights = c(1,1), respect = TRUE)
layout.show(nf)

and plotted the two graphs. The result is quadratic (that’s good), but when I add a caption to the two plots (in Latex) it is far out from the graph. What am I suppose to do? Any thougts are appreciated!

Answer 1

As Greg mentioned, you have to adjust the width and the height of the plot canvas if you want square plots but don’t want R to fill in large borders of whitespace.

Here is a minimal example using Sweave:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{Sweave}
\usepackage{tikz}
<<echo=FALSE,results=hide>>=
  require(tikzDevice)
@

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}
<<echo=FALSE,results=hide>>=
  # Standard LaTeX article class has a \textwidth of ~4.5in
  # Therefore, divide by 2 to get the right height.
  tikz('layout-ex.tex', width = 4.5, height = 2.25)

  Layout<- matrix(c(1, 2), nrow = 1, ncol=2, byrow = TRUE)
  nf <- layout(mat = Layout, widths = c(1,1),heights = c(1,1), respect = TRUE)
  layout.show(nf)

  dev.off()
@

  \centering
  \input{layout-ex}
  \label{fig:layout-ex}
  \caption{A layout with two sub-figures}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

The resulting figure looks like this: