Adjusting distance between plots

Question

I have a couple of ggplot plots that I want to merge using grid.arrange()

When I merge the plots there's a large white area around each plot making them far away from each other.

Is there a way to adjust the distance between the plots? and the size of the white area around the plots?

Answer 1

You can use theme(plot.margin) function in ggplot2 to reduce the spacing.

A simple working example here :

library(grid)
library(gridExtra)
library(ggplot2)

x <- seq(1,10,1)
y <- dnorm(x,mean=10,sd=0.5)


 # Create p1
p1 <- qplot(x,y) + theme(plot.margin=unit(c(1,1,-0.5,1),"cm"))

# Create p2
p2 <- qplot(x,y) + theme(plot.margin=unit(c(-0.5,1,1,1),"cm"))

grid.arrange(p1,p2)

Edit The four numbers are c(bottom,left,top,right)

Sample output