ggplot2, axis not showing after using theme(axis.line=element_line())

Solution 1:

The bug was fixed in ggplot2 v2.2.0 There is no longer a need to specify axis lines separately.

I think this is a bug in ggplot2 v2.1.0. (See this bug report and this one.) A workaround is to set the x-axis and y-axis lines separately.

  library(ggplot2)

  ggplot(data = mpg, aes(x = hwy, y = displ)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  theme_bw() + 
  theme(plot.background = element_blank(),
         panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
         panel.grid.minor = element_blank() )+
  theme(panel.border= element_blank())+
  theme(axis.line.x = element_line(color="black", size = 2),
        axis.line.y = element_line(color="black", size = 2))

Solution 2:

You don't need to specify axis-size for X and Y separately. When you are specifying size="2", R is considering value 2 as non-numeric argument. Hence, axis-line parameter is defaulted to 0 size. Use this line of code:

ggplot(data = mpg, aes(x = hwy, y = displ)) + geom_point() +xlab("Date")+ylab("Value of Home")+theme_bw() +theme(plot.background = element_blank(),panel.grid.major = element_blank(),panel.grid.minor = element_blank()) + theme(panel.border= element_blank()) + theme(axis.line = element_line(color="black", size = 2))

axis_line inherits from line in R, hence specifying size is mandatory for non-default values.