Arrange the plots nicely on R markdown pdf - ggplot2

Question

I am a newbie at R markdown and am trying to create a pdf with multiple plots.
This should hopefully be an easy fix for a more experienced user.
I am trying to create a nice pdf with multiple plots over 2/3 pages of a pdf.
I have been stuck on this a while and have looked at various older questions/answer on this site. I am trying to use the patchwork package using the example here:
When I render this to a pdf using R markdown, it only seems to plot on half the page like so:
I have tried playing around with fig.height, out.height="100%", and classoption in the yaml:
---
title: "QC Metrics Report.v1"
date: "`r format(Sys.time(), '%d %B, %Y')`"
output:
pdf_document: default
html_document:
df_print: paged
geometry: margin=1.5cm
classoption: a4paper, bottom=15mm
---
(my code)
```{r, echo=FALSE, message=FALSE, eval=TRUE}
p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(mpg, disp)) +
ggtitle('Plot 1')
p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear)) +
ggtitle('Plot 2')
p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(hp, wt, colour = mpg)) +
ggtitle('Plot 3')
p4 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_bar(aes(gear)) +
facet_wrap(~cyl) +
ggtitle('Plot 4')
p1 + p2 + p3 + p4
```
If I try with the plot_layout function e.g.
p1 + p2 + p3 + p4
plot_layout(ncol = 2)
half the page is a printout of text (which I don't want)
Please help!

Answer 1

If the case you are running into is overlapping text when you are arranging the plots then plot_spacer and tweaks to some theme options might do the trick.
---
title: "My Report"
subtitle: "Report.v1"
author: "John Doe"
date: "`r format(Sys.time(), '%d %B, %Y')`"
output:
pdf_document: default
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, fig.align =
"center")
library(tidyverse)
library(patchwork)
library(gapminder)
library(scales)
library(gridExtra)
my_countries <- c("Zambia", "Malawi", "Mozambique", "Tanzania", "Kenya")
east_africa <- gapminder %>%
filter(country %in% my_countries) %>%
mutate(country = fct_reorder2(country, year, lifeExp)) # reorder for plotting
bar <- east_africa %>%
filter(year == max(year)) %>% # most recent year only
ggplot(aes(x = country, y = lifeExp, fill = country)) +
geom_col(width = 0.75, alpha = 0.9) +
geom_text(
aes(label = number(lifeExp, 0.1)),
position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),
color = "white",
fontface = "bold",
size = 5
) +
scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
scale_y_continuous(expand = expand_scale(0.01, 0.05)) + # remove extra space between bars and x-axis labels
labs(y = "Life Expectancy (years)") +
theme_minimal(base_size = 16) +
theme(
legend.position = "none",
axis.title.x = element_blank(),
axis.title.y = element_text(size = 10),
axis.text.x = element_text(size = 7, angle = 45),
axis.title.y.left = element_text(margin = margin(r = 10)),
panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
panel.grid.major.x = element_blank()
)
#> Warning: `expand_scale()` is deprecated; use `expansion()` instead.
line <- east_africa %>%
ggplot(aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color = country)) +
geom_line(lwd = 1.25, key_glyph = "timeseries") + # for those cute glyphs in the legend
scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
labs(y = "Life Expectancy (years)") +
theme_minimal(base_size = 16) +
theme(
legend.position = "bottom",
legend.title = element_blank(),
axis.title.x = element_blank(),
axis.text.x = element_text(size = 7),
axis.title.y = element_text(size = 10),
axis.title.y.left = element_text(margin = margin(r = 10)),
panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
plot.margin = margin(t = 30)
)
tab <- east_africa %>%
filter(year == max(year)) %>%
transmute(
Country = country,
Population = comma(pop),
`GDP per capita` = dollar(gdpPercap, 1),
`Life Expectancy` = number(lifeExp, 0.1),
) %>%
arrange(Country) %>%
tableGrob(theme = ttheme_minimal(base_size = 10), rows = NULL)
layout <- bar + plot_spacer() + tab + plot_spacer() + line + plot_spacer()
layout +
plot_annotation(
title = "Life Expectancy of Selected Countries\n in East Africa",
caption = "Source: gapminder: Data from Gapminder
github.com/jennybc/gapminder
gapminder.org/data/",
theme = theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 16, hjust = 0.5, face = "bold"))
)
Created on 2022-10-30 with reprex v2.0.2
updated
If the case you are running into is that you have lots of code stuff in your actual pdf then use results = 'hide'
p1 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(mpg, disp)) +
ggtitle('Plot 1')
p2 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_boxplot(aes(gear, disp, group = gear)) +
ggtitle('Plot 2')
p3 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(hp, wt, colour = mpg)) +
ggtitle('Plot 3')
p4 <- ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_bar(aes(gear)) +
facet_wrap(~cyl) +
ggtitle('Plot 4')
p1 + p2 + p3 + p4