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

Question

Every time you are creating plots you might get this error - "Error in plot.new() : figure margins too large". To avoid such errors you can first check par("mar") output. You should be getting:

[1] 5.1 4.1 4.1 2.1

To change that write:

par(mar=c(1,1,1,1))

This should rectify the error. Or else you can change the values accordingly.

Hope this works for you.

This can happen when your plot panel in RStudio is too small for the margins of the plot you are trying to create. Try making expanding it and then run your code again.

RStudio UI causes an error when the plot panel is too small to display the chart:

Simply expanding the plot panel fixes the bug and displays the chart:

Invoking dev.off() to make RStudio open up a new graphics device with default settings worked for me. HTH.

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

Moreover Execute the command

graphics.off()

Just clear the plots and try executing the code again...It worked for me

Just a side-note. Sometimes this "margin" error occurs because you want to save a high-resolution figure (eg. dpi = 300 or res = 300) in R.
In this case, what you need to do is to specify the width and height. (Btw, ggsave() doesn't require this.)

This causes the margin error:

# eg. for tiff()
par(mar=c(1,1,1,1))
tiff(filename =  "qq.tiff",
     res = 300,                                                 # the margin error.
     compression = c( "lzw") )
# qq plot for genome wide association study (just an example)
qqman::qq(df$rawp, main = "Q-Q plot of GWAS p-values", cex = .3)
dev.off()

This will fix the margin error:

# eg. for tiff()
par(mar=c(1,1,1,1))
tiff(filename =  "qq.tiff",
     res = 300,                                                 # the margin error.
     width = 5, height = 4, units = 'in',                       # fixed
     compression = c( "lzw") )
# qq plot for genome wide association study (just an example)
qqman::qq(df$rawp, main = "Q-Q plot of GWAS p-values", cex = .3)
dev.off()

Try to set margin size by mai=c() in par(), e.g.,

par(mfcol=c(5,3),mai=c(0.5,0.5,0.5,0))

See the documentation for more details about mai