ggplot text size output differs inline and in knitted HTML

[nikita-telkar]

Hi,

I've been loving using Quarto, but one major issue for me is that the test size in the ggplot figures I see produced inline within my .qmd differs from what I see when I knit to HTML.

This was never an issue in .Rmd. The output I saw inline for .Rmd, is what I saw in my HTML i.e., the text would automatically scale up -- how can I retain the same in Quarto documents?

Within my custom theme, I have the following, but I can't keep changing the font sizes per plot (as pretty much all of my plots have varying heights and widths)

my_theme2 <- theme_minimal() +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 14),
        plot.subtitle = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 12),
        legend.title = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 12),
        legend.text = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 10),
        axis.title = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 14),
        axis.text = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 12),
        strip.text = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 12),
        plot.caption = element_text(family = "Jost", size = 10),
        panel.background = ggplot2::element_rect(color = "#F2F2F2"), 
        strip.background = ggplot2::element_rect(color = "#F2F2F2", fill = "#F2F2F2"),
        panel.spacing = unit(2, "lines"))

e.g., if I set the fig.width = 10 within my code chunk header, I get the two differing ggplots:

INLINE:

HTML:

Thank you very much!

[baptiste]

can you please provide a reproducible example, including the settings you use to set the figure size (fig-width and/or out-width)?
My understanding is that knitr produces plots at a fixed size set by fig.width (here 10 inches, so wider than a standard pdf text width, and out.width (optionally) to resize it to fit in a given space (which can therefore shrink/expand fonts from the original). And then there is an additional consideration, which is the size of the container in the parent document: in LaTeX, the text width can be varied, and if the plot is made to fill the space it will shrink/expand accordingly. Similarly, in HTML the width is set by the layout you use, and the figure environment.

So, in short, it's hard to tell without knowing more precisely what settings you're using.

[cderv]

In knitr, out.width is used to set the width to put on the HTML width attribute in img. With Quarto and Pandoc, it seems a style attribute is used instead with width set in CSS (not as img attributes). When out.width is not set, then it is computed using dpi as mentioned.

This difference is due to how Pandoc translate the width attribute to HTML

> pandoc --to html
![](test2_files/figure-html/plot1-1.png){width=100%}
^Z
<p><img src="test2_files/figure-html/plot1-1.png"
style="width:100.0%" /></p>

In R Markdown, the HTML is written directly by knitr in the intermediate .md file.

Anyhow, I don't know the impact of using style over the width attribute for img. Probably something to do with css rules override. Not sure which is the best thing to do. And moreover not sure it would impact the figure size in document.

Otherwise, fig.height and fig.width should be used to configure the graphic device that save the plot file on disk. No matter out.width, the file shoud be identical. I'll see if we have some difference in that somehow.

[baptiste]

I think the OP is asking about the inline preview of code chunks within the Rstudio editor, i.e.

(I may be wrong)

[cderv]

If so then this is something from the IDE itself, and there are already opened issue about that. See all of them in this EPIC: rstudio/rstudio#12740

I believe there is a specific behavior in IDE for inline plot. From rstudio/rstudio#11818

plots within the notebook (when no figure width or height are set) try to be adaptive to the editor size

So in your example above setting fig.width=10, fig.height=5 should change the inline figure you see.

Anyhow, we don't really control what the IDE is doing if this is indeed the issue.

[nikita-telkar]

Thank you all - I really appreciate the time spent on this thread!

Yes, @baptiste is correct, I'm talking about the difference with the RStudio IDE ggplot figure output when using a .qmd and the output observed in the knitted HTML of that same .qmd. Have posted in the RStudio GitHub discussions.

[joekeane7]

Could you paste the link to your discussion post please @nikita-telkar? I am having the same issue and wondering if you found a solution. I only get the shrinking text when I specify the size of the element in ggplot, if you use the default sizes on a simple plot such as the below the ratio of text and plot sizes remains the same in the html output (in my case anyway). But this isn't appropriate for all plotting so wondered if you got anywhere.

library(tidyverse)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth()