ggsave does not work with ggsurvplot objects anymore

[bipoff]

Hi,

first of all, thank you very much for providing us with this invaluable package! I used it for two years now, but now there is below issue coming up.

Thanks a lot!

Expected behavior

ggsave should be ble to save ggsurvplots with risk tables. I use plot = print(plot, newpage = F). Still it does not work as it used to work ealier.

Actual behavior

the saved pdf is empty

Steps to reproduce the problem

library(survival) library(survminer) library(tidyverse) library(Cairo) fit<- survfit(Surv(time, status) ~ sex, data = lung) plot <- ggsurvplot(fit, data = lung, risk.table = T) plot ggsave("plot.pdf", plot = print(plot, newpage = F), device = cairo_pdf)

session_info()

R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] Cairo_1.5-12.2  forcats_0.5.1   stringr_1.4.0   dplyr_1.0.7     purrr_0.3.4    
 [6] readr_1.4.0     tidyr_1.1.3     tibble_3.1.2    tidyverse_1.3.1 survminer_0.4.9
[11] ggpubr_0.4.0    ggplot2_3.3.5   survival_3.2-11

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] httr_1.4.2        jsonlite_1.7.2    splines_4.1.0     carData_3.0-4    
 [5] modelr_0.1.8      assertthat_0.2.1  cellranger_1.1.0  pillar_1.6.1     
 [9] backports_1.2.1   lattice_0.20-44   glue_1.4.2        digest_0.6.27    
[13] ggsignif_0.6.2    gridtext_0.1.4    rvest_1.0.0       colorspace_2.0-2 
[17] Matrix_1.3-3      pkgconfig_2.0.3   broom_0.7.8       haven_2.4.1      
[21] xtable_1.8-4      scales_1.1.1      km.ci_0.5-2       openxlsx_4.2.4   
[25] rio_0.5.27        KMsurv_0.1-5      generics_0.1.0    farver_2.1.0     
[29] car_3.0-11        ellipsis_0.3.2    withr_2.4.2       cli_3.0.0        
[33] magrittr_2.0.1    crayon_1.4.1      readxl_1.3.1      ggtext_0.1.1     
[37] fs_1.5.0          fansi_0.5.0       rstatix_0.7.0     xml2_1.3.2       
[41] foreign_0.8-81    tools_4.1.0       data.table_1.14.0 hms_1.1.0        
[45] lifecycle_1.0.0   munsell_0.5.0     reprex_2.0.0      zip_2.2.0        
[49] compiler_4.1.0    rlang_0.4.11      grid_4.1.0        rstudioapi_0.13  
[53] labeling_0.4.2    gtable_0.3.0      abind_1.4-5       DBI_1.1.1        
[57] curl_4.3.2        markdown_1.1      R6_2.5.0          gridExtra_2.3    
[61] zoo_1.8-9         lubridate_1.7.10  knitr_1.33        survMisc_0.5.5   
[65] utf8_1.2.1        stringi_1.6.2     Rcpp_1.0.7        vctrs_0.3.8      
[69] dbplyr_2.1.1      tidyselect_1.1.1  xfun_0.24

[igordot]

The ggsave option does not work anymore for me either. This may be an R 4.1 issue, but I have not investigated. In the meantime, you can try an alternate approach:

pdf("survplot.pdf")
print(surv_plot, newpage = FALSE)
dev.off()

[sstandage]

I have encountered the same problem with ggsave in R 4.1. The alternate approach proposed by igordot worked for me. Thanks!

[northNomad]

The ggsave option does not work anymore for me either. This may be an R 4.1 issue, but I have not investigated. In the meantime, you can try an alternate approach:

pdf("survplot.pdf")
print(surv_plot, newpage = FALSE)
dev.off()

This works well, thanks.

[sciencepeak]

I encounter the same issue that the ggsave doesn't work with ggsurvplot object any more. ggsave() can designate the width and length in mm, which is convenient for different requirements from different journals. So my workaround is this:

pdf(file = "survplot.pdf",
    width = measurements::conv_unit(x = 183, from = "mm", to = "inch"),
    height = measurements::conv_unit(x = 183, from = "mm", to = "inch"))

print(a_ggsurvplot_object, newpage = FALSE)

dev.off()

Anyway, I hope the developers can fix this bug with ggsave()

[DanChaltiel]

It seems that there is a plot member in the ggsurvplot object that we can use.

Therefore, this works for me: ggsave("plot.png", print(a_ggsurvplot_object$plot), width=17, height=10, units="cm")

Of course, this is only a workaround, as this will probably not take the table into account.

[fei0810]

You can try saving plot member and table member separately, and then remerging by cowplot package or patchwork package

p <- ggsurvplot(fit, data = lung)
p1 = p$plot
p2 = p$table
plotp = cowplot::plot_grid(p1,p2,align = "v",ncol =1,rel_heights = c(4,1))
ggsave(filename = "test.pdf", plot = plotp, device = "pdf")

[NikNakk]

Another workaround is to use ggsave("plot.pdf", survminer:::.buildggsurvplot(my_plot)). I think it's worth considering making survminer:::.buildggsurvplot(my_plot) an exported function since it is useful at times to be able to get the resultant gtable for downstream manipulation. I've therefore created issue #569 for this.

[jacobjcs]

Thanks, it works for me.

[zpeng2020]

You can try saving plot member and table member separately, and then remerging by cowplot package or patchwork package

p <- ggsurvplot(fit, data = lung)
p1 = p$plot
p2 = p$table
plotp = cowplot::plot_grid(p1,p2,align = "v",ncol =1,rel_heights = c(4,1))
ggsave(filename = "test.pdf", plot = plotp, device = "pdf")

This might be the best solution so far!