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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

ggthemes (development version)

  • BREAKING CHANGE: theme_excel_new() now matches the chart chrome Excel actually draws, decoded from the chart XML that Excel writes. Major gridlines are #D9D9D9 rather than #BFBFBF; axis lines are drawn in #BFBFBF, where previously there were none; and axis titles are one point larger than axis labels, as in Excel. Existing plots will change appearance.

  • theme_excel_new() documents that Excel’s font has been Aptos since 2023. base_family still defaults to "sans", since Aptos is rarely installed outside Office; pass base_family = "Aptos Narrow" for a closer match.

  • Add the current Microsoft Office theme, which Microsoft made the default in 2023, as the "Office" Excel theme: #156082, #E97132, #196B24, #0F9ED5, #A02B93, #4EA72E. ggthemes_data$excel$themes now has 51 themes.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: excel_new_pal(), scale_colour_excel_new() and scale_fill_excel_new() now default to theme = "Office" instead of "Office Theme", so they again match a default chart in current Excel. Plots that relied on the default will change appearance. Pass theme = "Office 2013" to keep the previous colours.

  • The Excel themes "Office Theme" and "Office 2007-2010" have been renamed "Office 2013" and "Office 2007", following Microsoft’s own renaming of the built-in themes. The old names still work and select the same colours as before.

  • Add bank_slopes_multiscale() and bank_plot_multiscale(), implementing multi-scale banking to 45 degrees (Heer and Agrawala 2006, section 3). Single-scale banking considers all of the data at once, so it accentuates local features and can obscure larger-scale trends. Multi-scale banking uses spectral analysis to identify the frequency scales that carry real energy, low-pass filters the data to each scale, and banks the resulting trend curve, returning one aspect ratio per scale. bank_slopes_multiscale() returns a tibble of frequencies and ratios; bank_plot_multiscale() returns one ggplot per scale, reproducing the small-multiples display used in the paper. On sunspot.year the implementation selects the same frequency scales the paper reports.

  • stata_shape_pal() now fails with a message naming the offending symbolstyles when Stata’s shape data does not contain the ten the palette selects. It previously looked them up with a bare match(), so a renamed or missing symbolstyle produced an all-NA row that was silently dropped as “no font-independent equivalent”, leaving max_n quietly below the documented ten. The list of ten now lives in one place and data-raw/build.R sources it, so the build’s duplicate-pch check cannot run over a stale copy.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: stata_shape_pal(), calc_shape_pal(), tableau_shape_pal() and cleveland_shape_pal() now return base pch codes by default instead of pch codes derived from Unicode glyphs. R draws a negative pch by asking the device font for that codepoint, so these palettes rendered as blank boxes in a font without coverage — R’s default sans covers one of the eight codepoints they relied on — and aborted outright on base pdf()/postscript(). Pass unicode = TRUE to restore the previous values. scale_shape_stata(), scale_shape_calc(), scale_shape_tableau() and scale_shape_cleveland() gain the same argument.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: max_n is reduced on the default branch for the palettes whose source symbols have no font-independent equivalent: calc 13 to 7, tableau_shape_pal("filled") 10 to 6, tableau_shape_pal("default") 10 to 8, cleveland_shape_pal(overlap = FALSE) 5 to 3 and tableau_shape_pal("proportions") 5 to 2. Those shapes are dropped rather than approximated by a different shape. stata_shape_pal() and few_shape_pal() are unaffected — their symbol sets map exactly.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: the pch column of the shape tables in ggthemes_data now holds the font-independent base pch, NA where there is none. The previous Unicode-derived values move to a new pch_unicode column, and a new shape column carries the canonical shape name both are derived from.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: tremmel_shape_pal() returned symbol sets that did not match Tremmel (1995). n = 2 now returns a solid circle and a plus sign (was two circles), overlap = TRUE returns an empty circle and a plus sign (was a square and a plus sign), and alt = TRUE returns a solid circle, plus sign and empty triangle (was identical to alt = FALSE, making the argument a no-op).

  • Fix scale_shape_tremmel() defaulting to alt = TRUE while tremmel_shape_pal() defaulted to alt = FALSE, so a palette and its own scale disagreed at n = 3. Both now default to FALSE, the variant Tremmel’s Experiment 1 measured.

  • Fix cleveland_shape_pal(overlap = TRUE) drawing a W where an S was intended; the stored row paired the name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S with pch 87.

  • Fix mislabelled and corrupted shape data: LibreOffice’s BLACK DOWN-POINTING CHARACTER (now TRIANGLE), Google Docs’ star named MULTIPLICATION X, Excel’s em dash declared as U+2013, and Tableau’s CLOUD WITH RAIN, stored as a mojibake sequence rather than U+1F327.

  • The shape tables are now validated as they are built: a shape name outside the vocabulary, a character that disagrees with its own unicode, or two shapes in one palette sharing a pch all fail the build, and the same checks run as tests against the built data.

  • warn_unicode_pch()’s locale guess is joined by a real font-coverage check using systemfonts::glyph_info() when systemfonts is installed, naming the glyphs the device font cannot draw. systemfonts is used in Suggests. The locale and coverage checks are independent failure modes and both run: a UTF-8 session can still meet a font with no glyph, and a font with full coverage still fails with mbcsToSbcs on a non-UTF-8 session. Note that R exposes no way to read back a device’s family=, so the probe measures the default font and the warning names the font it actually measured.

  • Discrete colour palettes now reject a negative n with an error naming the argument and the palette that was called. Palettes built on scales::manual_pal() — including calc_pal(), canva_pal(), colorblind_pal(), excel_pal(), excel_new_pal(), fivethirtyeight_pal(), gdocs_pal(), hc_pal(), stata_pal() and wsj_pal() — previously failed with R’s internal argument must be coercible to non-negative integer from seq_len(). This raises the minimum version of scales to 1.4.0, which is where scales::new_discrete_palette() was introduced.

  • bank_slopes() and bank_plot() report an invalid method, and tableau_shape_pal() an invalid palette, with a message naming the argument and the value supplied instead of match.arg()’s 'arg' should be one of .... Misspellings now get a “Did you mean” hint.

  • Deprecate ptol_pal(), scale_colour_ptol(), scale_color_ptol() and scale_fill_ptol(). Use the khroma package instead, which tracks Paul Tol’s colour schemes as he revises them. The ggthemes palette is the original 12-colour qualitative scheme from Tol’s 2012 technical note and has not followed the revisions on his current site, https://sronpersonalpages.nl/~pault/; the closest successor is khroma::colour("muted"). The functions still work, but warn.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: The Tableau palette "Red-Blue-Brown" has been renamed to "Blue-Red-Brown", matching both the name Tableau uses and the palette’s actual colour order (blue, red, brown). The old name still works but warns.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: The Tableau palette "Classic Area-Brown" has been renamed to "Classic Area Brown", for consistency with its siblings "Classic Area Red" and "Classic Area Green". The old name still works but warns.

  • Fix two corrupted colours in the "Gray Warm" ordered-sequential Tableau palette. Position 7 was #b047a4 (a magenta, in a warm-grey ramp) and is now #b0a8a4; position 18 was #665c51, which broke the ramp’s monotonic blue channel, and is now #665c5a. Plots using scale_colour_gradient_tableau("Gray Warm") will change appearance.

  • Fix a duplicated colour (#fa9d4f) in the "Red-Gold" ordered-sequential Tableau palette, which gave it 21 colours where every other 20-step Tableau sequential palette has 20. Plots using "Red-Gold" will change appearance.

  • Remove data-raw/theme-data/tableau-new.yml, an unused duplicate of tableau.yml.

  • The test suite no longer requires suggested packages to be installed. expect_hexcolor() used stringr and glue on every palette test, and stringr had moved from Imports to Suggests; it now uses base equivalents. The tests that genuinely need withr or farver skip when those are absent instead of erroring.

  • geom_rangeframe() now errors on a sides value that names no side, rather than silently drawing nothing. sides packs side letters into one string, so a typo such as sides = "xy" previously produced an empty layer with no message. Valid values are strings made up of "t", "r", "b" and "l".

  • Fix the ?extended_range_breaks help page, which described a function scales_extended_range_breaks() that does not exist and attributed the wrong return value to each function. extended_range_breaks_() returns the break values; extended_range_breaks() returns a breaks function. The page now also warns that ggplot2 passes a breaks function the expanded scale limits, so breaks = extended_range_breaks() labels the panel edges rather than the data extremes; apply the function to the data to label the extremes.

  • Fix theme_economist_white() failing on installations without dplyr. The internal get_colors() helper called dplyr::filter(), but dplyr is a suggested package, not an import; it now uses base subsetting. The test suite no longer uses dplyr either, so R CMD check passes with only the hard dependencies installed.

  • Fix the @family tags that split related help pages apart. Word-order and singular/plural inconsistencies (stata colour, solarized colour, shape stata, shape tableau) each put one page in a family of its own, so it linked to nothing. ?extended_range_breaks had no family at all and was unreachable from theme_tufte(), geom_rangeframe() and geom_tufteboxplot(), which it is meant to be used with; those four now cross-reference each other.

  • Add vdiffr visual regression baselines for every exported theme, and swatch baselines plus property assertions (valid hex, no duplicate colours, stable lengths, monotone lightness, no out-of-family colour, monotone grey ramps) for the Tableau palette families. These are development-only tests and do not run on CRAN; vdiffr (>= 1.0.6) and farver are now used in Suggests (#219).

  • Add support for Stata’s st scheme family, which has been Stata’s factory default since Stata 18. stata_pal() and scale_colour_stata() gain the "stcolor" scheme (the stc1–stc15 colours), and theme_stata() gains the "stcolor", "stcolor_alt", "stmono1", "stmono2" and "stsj" schemes. stgcolor and stgcolor_alt are not included: they differ from stcolor only in physical graph dimensions, which a ggplot2 theme does not carry.

  • The 19 named colours Stata 18 added (stc1–stc15 plus the stblue, stred, stgreen and styellow aliases) are now in ggthemes_data$stata$colors$names.

  • Omitting scheme in stata_pal(), scale_colour_stata(), scale_fill_stata() and theme_stata() is now soft-deprecated. It still resolves to "s2color", but the default will change to "stcolor" in ggthemes 8.0.0, following Stata. Pass scheme explicitly to keep the current appearance.

  • BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: stata_pal("mono") returned the wrong colours at positions 6 and 12 (gs14 and gs15 instead of gs12 and gs5). It now matches Stata’s s1mono/s2mono exactly, including the fact that Stata repeats gs12 and gs5 at positions 14 and 15. Plots using "mono" with six or more levels will change.

  • Fix stata_pal("economist"), which returned NA as its first colour because the scheme referred to a non-existent colour dkblue. It is now edkblue, matching Stata’s scheme-economist.scheme.

  • Fix attr(stata_pal(scheme), "max_n"), which reported 2 rather than 15 because it measured the columns of the palette table instead of its rows.

  • Add Apple Numbers support: numbers_pal(), scale_colour_numbers(), scale_color_numbers(), scale_fill_numbers(), and theme_numbers(). All 12 Numbers chart palettes are available by their Numbers names ("Classic", the default, through "Spectrum"), each providing six series colors. theme_numbers() follows the chart style defaults that ship inside Numbers: no panel fill, gridlines in the value direction only, a bottom chart border, and no tick marks.

  • The palettes are generated from Apple Numbers 14.5 by data-raw/reference/numbers/fetch.sh and data-raw/numbers_palettes.R; see data-raw/reference/numbers/SOURCES.md. This replaces data-raw/theme-data/numbers-charts.yml, an unused file added in 2018 that was never wired into data-raw/build.R and held iWork-era colors matching no current Numbers palette.

  • Fix two incorrect colours in the Google Docs palette, checked against the series colours a current Google Sheets chart actually renders. teal 2 was #ff994d, a duplicate of orange 2, and is now #7ed1d7; teal 3 was #c9e4e7 and is now #b5e5e8. This changes the output of gdocs_pal(), scale_colour_gdocs(), and scale_fill_gdocs() for more than 11 colours. The other 22 colours were already correct.

  • theme_gdocs() now matches the text colours Google Sheets uses. Sheets applies a graded hierarchy rather than one grey: axis tick labels are black, legend labels #1a1a1a, and axis titles and the x-axis line #333333. The chart title (#757575) and gridlines (#cccccc) are unchanged.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: hc_pal("default") now returns the palette Highcharts has used by default since v11.0.0 (#2caffe, #544fc5, #00e272, …). It previously returned the palette used before v11 (#7cb5ec, #434348, …), which Highcharts replaced in April 2023. Plots using scale_colour_hc() or scale_fill_hc() without an explicit palette will change appearance. The old palette is still available as hc_pal("classic").

  • BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: two colours in that older palette were wrong, and are corrected in "classic". Position 8 was #8085e8 (a near-duplicate of #8085e9 at position 5, differing by one hex digit) and is now #2b908f; position 9 was #8d4653 and is now #f45b5b. The old values match Highcharts 4.x; every Highcharts release from v5.0.0 to v10.x shipped the corrected pair.

  • hc_pal() and scale_colour_hc()/scale_fill_hc() gain the palettes bundled with Highcharts 13: "default_dark" (the dark-mode form of the default, which Highcharts selects via CSS light-dark()), "high_contrast_light" and "high_contrast_dark" (Highcharts’ own palette, tested for colour blindness and tailored to 3:1 contrast), "grid_light", "sand_signika", "avocado" and "sunset". Note that "avocado" and "sunset" have only four colours.

  • hc_pal() now reports a max_n attribute and warns when asked for more colours than the palette holds, matching the other ggthemes palettes.

  • theme_hc()‘s horizontal grid lines are now #e6e6e6, matching Highcharts’ --highcharts-neutral-color-10, rather than #D8D8D8.

  • theme_hc() gains the "default_dark", "grid_light" and "sand_signika" styles. "grid_light" is the one Highcharts theme that draws vertical grid lines. The "high_contrast", "avocado" and "sunset" themes are not included as styles: upstream they change nothing but the series colours, so they are available through hc_pal() and are meant to be combined with theme_hc("default") or theme_hc("default_dark").

  • BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: theme_hc("darkunica") drew all text in #A0A0A3 and titles in #FFFFFF. Highcharts uses #E0E0E3 for axis labels, titles and axis titles in this theme, so text is now #E0E0E3 throughout. The grid colour #707073 was already correct and is unchanged.

  • Fix unreadable axis labels in theme_hc("darkunica"). theme_hc() is a partial theme, and it never set axis.text, so the axis labels kept theme_grey()’s "grey30" and were drawn in dark grey on the near-black background. They now use the same colour as the rest of the theme’s text.

  • Remove data-raw/theme-data/highcharts.yml, an unused duplicate of hc.yml that still held the palettes from before v11.

  • theme_hc()’s examples now pass style rather than the deprecated bgcolor, and the last example uses scale_colour_hc() instead of scale_fill_hc(), which had no effect on its colour-mapped lines.

  • BREAKING CHANGE: theme_economist() and economist_pal() now follow the chart design The Economist introduced in 2017 and still publishes, replacing the pre-2017 style ggthemes had shipped since 2013. Existing plots will change appearance. The new look draws a white panel on a pale #e9edf0 ground with light horizontal gridlines, a black x-axis baseline with tick marks below it (they previously pointed inward), and no y-axis rule or ticks. economist_pal() returns the nine current chart colors (#006ba2, #3ebcd2, #379a8b, #ebb434, #b4ba39, #9a607f, #d1b07c, #758d99, #db444b) in place of the old blues and greens. Colors and geometry are transcribed from The Economist visual styleguide v1.2 (4 May 2017); see data-raw/reference/economist/.

  • ggthemes_data$economist is restructured to match: main (the nine series colors plus “Econ red”), scales (the styleguide’s “equal lightness colour scales”, six ordered steps for each of the nine hues), bg, and text. The former fg and bg entries are gone; their values are recorded in a comment in data-raw/theme-data/economist.yml.

  • Add economist_seq_pal() and economist_gradient_pal(), plus scale_colour_economist_c()/scale_fill_economist_c() for continuous data and scale_colour_economist_ordinal()/scale_fill_economist_ordinal() for ordered factors, built from the equal-lightness scales.

  • Deprecate theme_economist_white() (lifecycle::deprecate_warn()); the current design already draws a white panel, so it no longer differs from theme_economist(), to which it now forwards.

  • Deprecate the dkpanel argument of theme_economist() and the fill argument of economist_pal(). Both were features of the pre-2017 design and are now ignored.

  • Fix: theme_economist() previously looked up a background colour named "ebg", which economist.yml did not define, so rect and strip.background silently received a fill of NA. The rewritten theme sets both explicitly.

ggthemes 6.0.0

ggthemes 5.2.0

CRAN release: 2025-11-30

ggthemes 5.1.0

CRAN release: 2024-02-09

  • Updated scale_color_gdocs and gdocs_pal to use current colors. Palette extended from 10 to 24 colors.
  • Updated tests to be compatible with ggplot 3.5.0 (#153)
  • Removed legend.title.align and legend.text.align from themes. (#153)

ggthemes 5.0.0

CRAN release: 2023-11-21

  • Deprecate circlefill_shape_pal and scale_shape_circlefill
  • Bugfix: Fix failing CRAN tests. Shape scales and palettes could fail if glyphs unavailable in graphics devices.
  • Bugfix: Add alias to ggthemes-package
  • Add quantreg to suggested packages

ggthemes 4.2.3

  • Fixing URLs for CRAN submission again.

ggthemes 4.2.2

  • Fixing URLs for CRAN submission.

ggthemes 4.2.1

  • Conditionally use the vdiffr package in tests so it complies with suggested package policy (#124)
  • Fix error in expect_equal functions (#123)
  • Fix errors in geom_tufteboxplot and stat_fivenumber due to missing imported objects from ggplot2 (#117, #121)
  • Fix text labels in top axis in theme_economist (#115)
  • Update documentation on geom_rangeframe; it should be used with coord_cartesian(clip="off"). (#120)

ggthemes 4.2.0

CRAN release: 2019-05-13

ggthemes 4.1.1

CRAN release: 2019-04-09

  • Fix bugs in geom_rangeframe and geom_tufteboxplot caused by failing to import alpha. (Thanks @flying-sheep, #110)

ggthemes 4.1.0

CRAN release: 2019-02-19

ggthemes 4.0.1

CRAN release: 2018-08-24

ggthemes 4.0.0

CRAN release: 2018-07-19

  • Added palettes and based on current versions of Excel: excel_pal_new(), scale_colour_excel_new(), and scale_fill_excel_new(). Excel ’97 based scales keep the same names.

  • Added theme_excel_new() which is based on the chart defaults of current versions of Excel.

  • Added Tableau 10 palettes and renamed old palettes in tableau_color_pal(), scale_color_tableau(), scale_fill_tableau(), and others. The continuous sequential and diverging palettes are improved by including more intermediate steps.

  • Updated theme_gdocs() to current look.

  • Updated scale_color_gdocs() and fill_color_gdocs() to current color.

  • Added scale_shapes_few() and few_shape_pal() with a shape scale and palette from Stephen Few’s “Show Me the Numbers”.

  • Removed stata argument from scale_*_economist() and theme_economist().

  • Changed the format of the ggthemes_data object.

  • Changed behavior of few_pal(). If n = 1, use gray. If n > 1 use non-gray colors.

  • Changed tremmel_shape_scale() to use alt = TRUE by default

  • Deprecated tremmel_shape_scale() argument n3alt. Use the alt argument instead.

  • Added a pkgdown site.

  • Removed vignette. Move all examples to man pages.

  • Bugfix: Fix theme_few() (#91)

  • Bugfix: Update themes to be consistent with ggplot>=3.2.0

ggthemes 3.5.0

CRAN release: 2018-05-07

ggthemes 3.4.2

CRAN release: 2018-04-03

ggthemes 3.4.1

ggthemes 3.4.0

CRAN release: 2017-02-19

ggthemes 3.3.0

CRAN release: 2016-11-24

ggthemes 3.2.0

CRAN release: 2016-07-11

  • Bugfix: In function bank_slopes(), remove methods ao, gor, and lor. These methods were not producing reliable results, and should not produce results much different than ms or as. If used, they will produce a warning, and ms will be used instead. (#68)

ggthemes 3.1.0

ggthemes 3.0.4

ggthemes 3.0.3

CRAN release: 2016-04-09

  • Bugfix: remove lintr tests that broke with new testthat.

ggthemes 3.0.2

CRAN release: 2016-02-26

ggthemes 3.0.1

CRAN release: 2016-01-10

  • Bugfix: Remove border around legends in theme_gdocs(). Thanks SandyMuspratt! Pull request #53.

  • Bugfix: Remove border around legends in theme_calc().

  • Bugfix: Add colour and fill values to theme_foundation(). This restores its behavior to version 2.2.1. Fixes Issue #56.

ggthemes 3.0.0

CRAN release: 2015-12-20

ggthemes 2.2.1

CRAN release: 2015-07-01

ggthemes 2.2.0

ggthemes 2.1.1

  • bugfix: use title case in package title; refer to ggplot2 in title
  • bugfix: fix non-escaped URLs in colorblind.R
  • bugfix: fix broken URL in few.R
  • bugfix: remove non-ascii characters in shapes.R
  • bugfix: use requireNamespace() instead of require()

ggthemes 2.1.0

CRAN release: 2014-12-18

  • New theme and scale based on Highcharts JS: scale_*_hc(), theme_hc(). Thanks jbkunst!

ggthemes 2.0.0

ggthemes 1.9.0

ggthemes 1.8.0

ggthemes 1.7.0

CRAN release: 2014-04-22

ggthemes 1.6.1

ggthemes 1.6.0

CRAN release: 2013-12-14

ggthemes 1.5.1

CRAN release: 2013-10-20

  • fix failures in R CMD check

ggthemes 1.5.0

ggthemes 1.4.0

ggthemes 1.3.4

ggthemes 1.3.3

CRAN release: 2013-03-25

ggthemes 1.3.1

CRAN release: 2012-12-22

ggthemes 1.3.0

ggthemes 1.2.0

ggthemes 1.1.0