Cannot remove panel.grid (graticules) from ggplot + geom_sf()

[tiernanmartin]

I would like to completely remove the graticule lines from my plot, but it is unclear which argument in theme() controls the graticule lines.

Reprex

library(sf) 
library(ggplot2)

nc = st_read(system.file("gpkg/nc.gpkg", package = "sf")) 

ggplot(nc) + 
  geom_sf(data = nc, aes(fill = AREA)) + 
  coord_sf(crs = st_crs(nc)) + 
  theme(
    panel.ontop = TRUE,   ## Note: this is to make the panel grid visible in this example
    panel.grid = element_blank(), 
    line = element_blank(), 
    rect = element_blank(), 
    text = element_blank(), 
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "black"))

[LucasPuente]

Looks like a bug.

One trick I discovered to solve this is to set the color of the panel.grid.major equal to the background color. In your example, this would mean + theme(panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = "black")).

I call this a bug because theme(panel.grid.major = element_blank()) is not working.

[mdsumner]

Another use-case where it's important not to have the graticule is when the crs is NA. Currently there's a test for is.na(crs) in CoordSf that can fail, which could be replaced with

identical(sf::NA_crs_, crs)

I started a PR but can't test the outcome of this fix fully since the graticule logic doesn't work. An example is

nc <- sf::st_read(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package = "sf"), quiet = TRUE)

nc_na <- sf::st_set_crs(nc, NA)
ggplot(nc_na) + coord_sf()
#Error in if (st_is_longlat(crs)) bb = trim_bb(bb, margin) : 
#  missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed

It's an error from sf but presume ggplot2 would like to be robust against this anyway (setting CRS to NA is required to avoid ellipsoid geometry logic in sf, and for any sf object that isn't some kind of map projection).

Happy to help explore more and create examples if that helps but the overall solution is beyond me atm.

[tiernanmartin]

@LucasPuente or perhaps + theme(panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = 'transparent')) - this would allow the plot to be saved without any panel background.

[edzer]

This requires coord_sf(datum = NA), e.g.

library(sf) 
library(ggplot2)

nc = st_read(system.file("gpkg/nc.gpkg", package = "sf")) 

ggplot(nc) + 
  geom_sf(data = nc, aes(fill = AREA)) + 
  coord_sf(crs = st_crs(nc), datum = NA) + 
  theme(
    panel.ontop = TRUE,   ## Note: this is to make the panel grid visible in this example
    panel.grid = element_blank(), 
    line = element_blank(), 
    rect = element_blank(), 
    text = element_blank(), 
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "black"))

and still gives two warnings that need to be solved in ggplot2.

[edzer]

r-spatial/sf@812cdff now removes the need to patch ggplot2.

[jsta]

Note that the solution provided above will not hide the graticules if coord_sf is called before geom_sf.

[lock]

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