Create a Timeline rendered by ggplot2

Provide a data frame with event data to create a static timeline plot created by ggplot2. Simplest drawable dataframe can have columns `event` and `start`.

gg_vistime(
  data,
  col.event = "event",
  col.start = "start",
  col.end = "end",
  col.group = "group",
  col.color = "color",
  col.fontcolor = "fontcolor",
  optimize_y = TRUE,
  linewidth = NULL,
  title = NULL,
  show_labels = TRUE,
  background_lines = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

data: data.frame that contains the data to be visualized
col.event: (optional, character) the column name in data that contains event names. Default: event.
col.start: (optional, character) the column name in data that contains start dates. Default: start.
col.end: (optional, character) the column name in data that contains end dates. Default: end.
col.group: (optional, character) the column name in data to be used for grouping. Default: group.
col.color: (optional, character) the column name in data that contains colors for events. Default: color, if not present, colors are chosen via RColorBrewer.
col.fontcolor: (optional, character) the column name in data that contains the font color for event labels. Default: fontcolor, if not present, color will be black.
optimize_y: (optional, logical) distribute events on y-axis by smart heuristic (default), otherwise use order of input data.
linewidth: (optional, numeric) the linewidth (in pixel) for the events (typically used for large amount of parallel events). Default: heuristic value.
title: (optional, character) the title to be shown on top of the timeline. Default: NULL.
show_labels: (optional, boolean) choose whether or not event labels shall be visible. Default: TRUE.
background_lines: (optional, integer) the number of vertical lines to draw in the background to demonstrate structure (default: heuristic).
...: for deprecated arguments up to vistime 1.1.0 (like events, colors, ...)

Value

gg_vistime returns an object of class gg and ggplot.

Examples

# presidents and vice presidents
pres <- data.frame(
  Position = rep(c("President", "Vice"), each = 3),
  Name = c("Washington", rep(c("Adams", "Jefferson"), 2), "Burr"),
  start = c("1789-03-29", "1797-02-03", "1801-02-03"),
  end = c("1797-02-03", "1801-02-03", "1809-02-03"),
  color = c("#cbb69d", "#603913", "#c69c6e")
)

gg_vistime(pres, col.event = "Position", col.group = "Name", title = "Presidents of the USA")


if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# ------ It is possible to change all attributes of the timeline using ggplot2::theme()
data <- read.csv(text="event,start,end
                       Phase 1,2020-12-15,2020-12-24
                       Phase 2,2020-12-23,2020-12-29
                       Phase 3,2020-12-28,2021-01-06
                       Phase 4,2021-01-06,2021-02-02")

p <- gg_vistime(data, optimize_y = T, col.group = "event", title = "ggplot customization example")

library(ggplot2)
p + theme(
  plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0, size=30),
  axis.text.x = element_text(size = 30, color = "violet"),
  axis.text.y = element_text(size = 30, color = "red", angle = 30),
  panel.border = element_rect(linetype = "dashed", fill=NA),
  panel.background = element_rect(fill = 'green')) +
  coord_cartesian(ylim = c(0.7, 3.5))
} # }

Arguments

Value

See also

Examples