Error in plot.new() : figure margins too large in R

Question

This error can occur in Rstudio simply because your "Plots" pane is just barely too small. Try zooming your "Files, Plots, Packages, Help, Viewer" and see if it helps!

The problem is that the small figure region 2 created by your layout() call is not sufficiently large enough to contain just the default margins, let alone a plot.

More generally, you get this error if the size of the plotting region on the device is not large enough to actually do any plotting. For the OP's case the issue was having too small a plotting device to contain all the subplots and their margins and leave a large enough plotting region to draw in.

RStudio users can encounter this error if the Plot tab is too small to leave enough room to contain the margins, plotting region etc. This is because the physical size of that pane is the size of the graphics device. These are not independent issues; the plot pane in RStudio is just another plotting device, like png(), pdf(), windows(), and X11().

Solutions include:

1. reducing the size of the margins; this might help especially if you are trying, as in the case of the OP, to draw several plots on the same device.

2. increasing the physical dimensions of the device, either in the call to the device (e.g. png(), pdf(), etc) or by resizing the window / pane containing the device

3. reducing the size of text on the plot as that can control the size of margins etc.

Reduce the size of the margins

Before the line causing the problem try:

par(mar = rep(2, 4))

then plot the second image

image(as.matrix(leg),col=cx,axes=T)

You'll need to play around with the size of the margins on the par() call I show to get this right.

Increase the size of the device

You may also need to increase the size of the actual device onto which you are plotting.

A final tip, save the par() defaults before changing them, so change your existing par() call to:

op <- par(oma=c(5,7,1,1))

then at the end of plotting do

par(op)

If you get this message in RStudio, clicking the 'broomstick' figure "Clear All Plots" in Plots tab and trying plot() again may work.

This sometimes happen in RStudio. In order to solve it you can attempt to plot to an external window (Windows-only):

windows() ## create window to plot your file
## ... your plotting code here ...
dev.off() 

I got this error in R Studio, and was simply fixed by making the sidebar bigger by clicking and dragging on its edge from right to left.

Picture here: https://janac.medium.com/error-in-plot-new-figure-margins-too-large-in-r-214621b4b2af

Check if your object is a list or a vector. To do this, type is.list(yourobject). If this is true, try renaming it x<-unlist(yourobject). This will make it into a vector you can plot.