[R] Plot a legend outside of the plotting area in base graphics?

Question

As the title says: How can I plot a legend outside the plotting area when using base graphics?

I thought about fiddling around with layout and produce an empty plot to only contain the legend, but I would be interested in a way using just the base graph facilities and e.g., par(mar = ) to get some space on the right of the plot for the legend.

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Here an example:

plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, type = "o", ylim=c(-2,2))
lines(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 2, lty = 2, type="o")
legend(1,-1,c("group A", "group B"), pch = c(1,2), lty = c(1,2))

produces:

But as said, I would like the legend to be outside the plotting area (e.g., to the right of the graph/plot.

Answer 1

Try layout() which I have used for this in the past by simply creating an empty plot below, properly scaled at around 1/4 or so and placing the legend parts manually in it.

There are some older questions here about legend() which should get you started.

Answer 2

I can offer only an example of the layout solution already pointed out.

layout(matrix(c(1,2), nrow = 1), widths = c(0.7, 0.3))
par(mar = c(5, 4, 4, 2) + 0.1)
plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, type = "o", ylim=c(-2,2))
lines(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 2, lty = 2, type="o")
par(mar = c(5, 0, 4, 2) + 0.1)
plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, ylim=c(-2,2), type = "n", axes = FALSE, ann = FALSE)
legend(1, 1, c("group A", "group B"), pch = c(1,2), lty = c(1,2))

Answer 3

Maybe what you need is par(xpd=TRUE) to enable things to be drawn outside the plot region. So if you do the main plot with bty='L' you'll have some space on the right for a legend. Normally this would get clipped to the plot region, but do par(xpd=TRUE) and with a bit of adjustment you can get a legend as far right as it can go:

 set.seed(1) # just to get the same random numbers
 par(xpd=FALSE) # this is usually the default

 plot(1:3, rnorm(3), pch = 1, lty = 1, type = "o", ylim=c(-2,2), bty='L')
 # this legend gets clipped:
 legend(2.8,0,c("group A", "group B"), pch = c(1,2), lty = c(1,2))

 # so turn off clipping:
 par(xpd=TRUE)
 legend(2.8,-1,c("group A", "group B"), pch = c(1,2), lty = c(1,2))