Multiple ggplots of different sizes

Question

It's relatively simple using grid.arrange in the gridExtra package to arrange multiple plots in a matrix, but how can you arrange plots (the ones I'm working on are from ggplot2) when some plots are intended to be larger than others? In base, I can use layout() such as in the example below:

 nf <- layout(matrix(c(1,1,1,2,3,1,1,1,4,5,6,7,8,9,9), byrow=TRUE, nrow=3))  layout.show(nf) 

what is the equivalent for ggplot plots?

Some plots for inclusion

library(ggplot2) p1 <- qplot(x=wt,y=mpg,geom="point",main="Scatterplot of wt vs. mpg", data=mtcars) p2 <- qplot(x=wt,y=disp,geom="point",main="Scatterplot of wt vs disp", data=mtcars) p3 <- qplot(wt,data=mtcars) p4 <- qplot(wt,mpg,data=mtcars,geom="boxplot") p5 <- qplot(wt,data=mtcars) p6 <- qplot(mpg,data=mtcars) p7 <- qplot(disp,data=mtcars) p8 <- qplot(disp, y=..density.., geom="density", data=mtcars) p9 <- qplot(mpg, y=..density.., geom="density", data=mtcars) 

Answer 1

You can use nested arrangeGrob calls like this example:

library(ggplot2) library(gridExtra)  p <- ggplot(data.frame(x=1, y=1), aes(x,y)) + geom_point()  grid.arrange(   arrangeGrob(     p,      arrangeGrob(p, p, nrow=2),     ncol=2 ,widths=c(2,1)),   arrangeGrob(p, p ,p ,ncol=3, widths=rep(1,3)),   nrow=2) 

Edit:

gl <- lapply(1:9, function(ii) grobTree(rectGrob(),textGrob(ii)))  grid.arrange(   arrangeGrob(gl[[1]],               do.call(arrangeGrob, c(gl[2:5], ncol=2)),               nrow=1,               widths=3:2),   do.call(arrangeGrob, c(gl[6:9], nrow=1, list(widths=c(1,1,1,2)))), nrow=2, heights=c(2,1)) 

Answer 2

An alternative with gtable

library(gtable)  gl <- lapply(1:9, function(ii) grobTree(textGrob(ii), rectGrob())) # gl <- lapply(1:9, function(ii) ggplotGrob(qplot(1,1) + ggtitle(ii)))  gt <- gtable(widths=unit(rep(1,5), "null"),              heights=unit(rep(1,3), "null"))  gtable_add_grobs <- gtable_add_grob # alias  gt <- gtable_add_grobs(gt, gl,                         l=c(1,4,5,4,5,1,2,3,4),                        r=c(3,4,5,4,5,1,2,3,5),                        t=c(1,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3),                        b=c(2,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3)) grid.newpage() grid.draw(gt)