Layout when one plot has exceptionally tall labels?

[bbimber]

Hello,

I have a layer where I'd like to align 3 plots. One of the plots has exceptionally tall x-axis labels. The layout is:

patchwork::plot_layout(design = 'ACC\nBCC') 

You will see in the bottom-left there is wasted whitespace. Is there a way to get patchwork to align the left two plots such that they take up the entire vertical space? Thanks for any help.

[thomasp85]

You are correct that the reasons are the x-axis text. patchwork in general will try to align axes. In case this is not what you want you have to treat the left-hand side as a single plot using the wrap_elements() function.

Some fiddling must be done to remove the margin around the left-hand patchwork so the top of the two plots aligns

e.g. this doesn't look nice at the top:

library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)

p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_point(aes(mpg, disp)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 1')

p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 2')

p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_point(aes(hp, wt, colour = mpg)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 3') + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size = 30))

wrap_elements(full = p1 / p2) | p3

^{Created on 2023-08-07 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

however, removing the margin around the two stacked plots makes it all looks better but is a bit more fiddly

library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)

p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_point(aes(mpg, disp)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 1')

p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 2')

p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) + 
  geom_point(aes(hp, wt, colour = mpg)) + 
  ggtitle('Plot 3') + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size = 30))

wrap_elements(full = p1 / p2 + plot_annotation(theme = theme(plot.margin = margin()))) | p3

^{Created on 2023-08-07 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}