ggpointgrid

This package provides a core algorithm, a ggplot2 stat, and multiple ggplot2 geoms to rearrange point coordinates on regular grids. This has multiple applications, but primarily serves to strictly avoid overplotting in scatter plots. It is useful in situations where every individual observation should be clearly distinguishable.

Blog posts

• Labelling: geom_textgrid and geom_labelgrid perform the same arrangement operation for text labels as geom_pointgrid does for points. geom_segmentgrid draws segments between the original point positions and the new grid positions. Together these geoms enable a mechanism for label plotting in scatter plots and maps. This post shows three examples of this feature: https://nevrome.de/blog/posts/2026-05-18-labelling-with-ggpointgrid.html
• Futhark: ggpointgrid uses futhark for the implementation of its essential algorithms. Read more about this special setup here: https://nevrome.de/blog/posts/2026-01-12-futhark-in-ggpointgrid.html.

Installation

You can install ggpointgrid from GitHub with the following command (in your R console):

if(!require('remotes')) install.packages('remotes')
remotes::install_github("nevrome/ggpointgrid")

Windows users will need the Rtools to build the package.

Examples

Point arrangement with geom_pointgrid

geom_pointgrid aims to optimize the arrangement of observations on a regular grid. This works well for figures with continuously scaled x- and y-axes, so for scatter-plots or even map plots. Just as in geom_jitter the rearrangement of the points reduces accuracy and precision of positional information on x and y in favour of making every observation visible.

The grid properties are controlled with the parameters grid_x and grid_y, which allow to precisely specify the desired graticules.

library(ggplot2)
set.seed(5) # the seed is for geom_jitter

df <- tibble::tibble(
  x = rep(c(1,1,2,3,3), times = 10),
  y = rep(c(1,3,2,1,3), times = 10),
  var = sample(c("A", "B", "C"), size = 50, replace = T)
)

coord <- coord_fixed(xlim = c(0.5,3.5), ylim = c(0.5,3.5))

p1 <- ggplot(df) +
  geom_point(aes(x, y, color = var)) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_point")

p2 <- ggplot(df) +
  geom_jitter(aes(x, y, color = var), width = 0.3, height = 0.3) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_jitter")

p3 <- ggplot(df) +
  ggpointgrid::geom_pointgrid(aes(x, y, color = var), grid_x = 15L, grid_y = 15L) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_pointgrid")

p4 <- ggplot(df) +
  ggpointgrid::geom_pointgrid(
    aes(x, y, color = var),
    grid_x = seq(min(df$x) - 0.3, max(df$x) + 0.3, length.out = 18),
    grid_y = seq(min(df$y) - 0.3, max(df$y) + 0.3, length.out = 18)
  ) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_pointgrid, grid specified")

cowplot::plot_grid(p1, p2, p3, p4)

Point arrangement with geom_pointrect

geom_pointrect was designed for a slightly different use-case than geom_pointgrid. Here all observations that share the x- and y-coordinate are spread out into a rectangular grid, representing only this one position. This is especially useful, when the x- and y- axis are ordinally scaled.

The order within each rectangle can be set by the order of the input data.frame and the arguments scale_x and scale_y control the size of the per-position box. The arguments round_x and round_y allow to specify how data on continuously scaled x- and y-axes should be aggregated.

df <- tibble::tibble(
  x = rep(letters[c(1,1,2,3,3)], times = 10),
  y = rep(letters[c(1,3,2,1,3)], times = 10),
  var = sample(c("A", "B", "C"), size = 50, replace = T)
) |> dplyr::arrange(var)

coord <- coord_fixed()

p4 <- ggplot(df) +
  geom_point(aes(x, y, color = var)) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_point")

p5 <- ggplot(df) +
  geom_jitter(aes(x, y, color = var), width = 0.3, height = 0.3) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_jitter")

p6 <- ggplot(df) +
  ggpointgrid::geom_pointrect(aes(x, y, color = var)) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_pointrect")

p7 <- ggplot(df) +
  ggpointgrid::geom_pointrect(
    aes(x, y, color = var),
    scale_x = 0.2,
    scale_y = 0.2
  ) +
  coord + ggtitle("geom_pointrect, scaling set")

cowplot::plot_grid(p4, p5, p6, p7)