What’s new in {PrettyCols} 1.1.0?
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Back in September 2022 I submitted {PrettyCols}, an R package containing aesthetically pleasing colour palettes, to CRAN. If you missed it, you can read the blog post introducing the package!
Over a year after the last CRAN release, it was time for an update and this blog post will give you a brief overview of some of the new features and palettes! You can install {PrettyCols} using:
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install.packages("PrettyCols") |
You can also install the development version from GitHub using:
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remotes::install_github("nrennie/PrettyCols") |
Breaking changes
Previous versions of {PrettyCols} used the name
argument in all of the {ggplot2} scale
functions to define the name of the palette you wanted to use. Unfortunately, {ggplot2} uses name
to define the name of the legend. This meant there was an inconsistency between {PrettyCols} and other {ggplot2} scale functions, and I wanted to fix that in this release. Now, the behaviour is more consistent.
- Change: the
palette
argument is now used to define the name of the colour palette you want to use.
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library(ggplot2) ggplot( data = mtcars, mapping = aes(x = cyl, fill = as.factor(gear)) ) + geom_bar() + scale_fill_pretty_d(palette = "Peppers") |
For example, if you have previously scale_fill_manual(name = "Bright")
to say you want to use the "Bright"
palette, this will result in an error. Please use scale_fill_manual(palette = "Bright")
instead. If you didn’t explicitly name the argument for the palette name, your code should still work.
Changing the legend name
To get around the problem above, earlier versions of {PrettyCols} added a legend_title
argument to the scale_*_pretty_*()
functions. The legend_title
argument still works, but you will get a deprecation warning. To maintain consistency with other {ggplot2} scale functions, you should use name
instead.
- Change: the
name
argument sets the legend (scale) name.
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ggplot( data = mtcars, mapping = aes(x = mpg, y = disp, colour = wt) ) + geom_point(size = 5) + scale_colour_pretty_c("Roses", name = "New Title") |
Diverging scales
There were several diverging palettes already within {PrettyCols}, and in version 1.1.0 you can now use the palettes with diverging scales in {ggplot2} more easily.
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ggplot( data = mtcars, mapping = aes(x = mpg, y = disp, fill = wt) ) + geom_point(size = 5, pch = 21) + scale_fill_pretty_div( palette = "PurpleYellows", midpoint = mean(mtcars$wt) ) |
The following diverging scales functions now exist:
scale_colour_pretty_div()
andscale_color_pretty_div()
scale_fill_pretty_div()
They work similarly to scale_*_gradient2()
.
More palettes!
The new release contains eight additional palettes, taking the total up to 40 palettes! You can see the complete list of available palettes by running view_all_palettes()
or browsing the
package vignette on available palettes.
Python support
A Python implementation of {PrettyCols} existed in previous releases, but Python support has now moved to a separate GitHub repository. See github.com/nrennie/PrettyPyCols.*
To end this post, here’s another couple of examples of these palettes being used for generative art!
Show code
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aRt::split_grid( col_palette = prettycols("Coast"), grid_col = prettycols("Coast")[3], n_x = 6, n_y = 6 ) aRt::window_boxes( col_palette = prettycols("Disco"), n_x = 20, n_y = 20 ) |
If you find that something in {PrettyCols} isn’t working, or if you’ve got an idea for more features, please raise a GitHub issue!
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