Color of gridlines and background

Question

It seems that this question fist appeared around 2007.

The question is this:

How to change gridline and background color when plotting with ggplot2 in R? I add two pictures as an example on what I mean by background and gridline color.

Back in 2007, Hadley Wickham said that appearance functionalities were missing (this included changing the color of background). Does anybody knows if there's an update that allows to change the background color and the color of gridlines?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Note: Since version 0.9.2 this is done using theme:

theme(panel.background = element_rect(colour = "white"))

Additionally, there are panel.grid.major and panel.grid.minor options. See here for a full list of options and some examples. There is also documentation at ?theme.

In older version of ggplot2 this was done via:

opts(panel.background=theme_rect(colour="white"),...)

You can also switch to more traditional theme using theme_bw().

You can also find information on themes and opts() on this SO thread.