How to increase the space between the bars in a bar plot in ggplot2?

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You can always play with the width parameter, as shown below:

df <- data.frame(x=factor(LETTERS[1:4]), y=sample(1:100, 4))
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data=df, aes(x=x, y=y, width=.5)) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", position="identity") +
  opts(title="width = .5") + labs(x="", y="") +
  theme_bw()

Compare with the following other settings for width:

alt text

So far, so good. Now, suppose we have two factors. In case you would like to play with evenly spaced juxtaposed bars (like when using space together with beside=TRUE in barplot()), it’s not so easy using geom_bar(position="dodge"): you can change bar width, but not add space in between adjacent bars (and I didn’t find a convenient solution on Google). I ended up with something like that:

df <- data.frame(g=gl(2, 1, labels=letters[1:2]), y=sample(1:100, 4))
x.seq <- c(1,2,4,5)
ggplot(data=transform(df, x=x.seq), aes(x=x, y=y, width=.85)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity", aes(fill=g)) + labs(x="", y="") + 
  scale_x_discrete(breaks = NA) + 
  geom_text(aes(x=c(sum(x.seq[1:2])/2, sum(x.seq[3:4])/2), y=0, 
                label=c("X","Y")), vjust=1.2, size=8)

The vector used for the $x$-axis is “injected” in the data.frame, so that so you change the outer spacing if you want, while width allows to control for inner spacing. Labels for the $x$-axis might be enhanced by using scale_x_discrete().

alt text

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