Make waffle (square pie) charts

Given a named vector or a data frame, this function will return a ggplot object that represents a waffle chart of the values. The individual values will be summed up and each that will be the total number of squares in the grid. You can perform appropriate value transformation ahead of time to get the desired waffle layout/effect.

waffle(parts, rows = 10, keep = TRUE, xlab = NULL, title = NULL,
  colors = NA, size = 2, flip = FALSE, reverse = FALSE,
  equal = TRUE, pad = 0, use_glyph = FALSE, glyph_size = 12,
  glyph_font = "Font Awesome 5 Free Solid",
  glyph_font_family = "FontAwesome5Free-Solid", legend_pos = "right")

Arguments

parts	named vector of values or a data frame to use for the chart
rows	number of rows of blocks
keep	keep factor levels (i.e. for consistent legends across waffle plots)
xlab	text for below the chart. Highly suggested this be used to give the "1 sq == xyz" relationship if it's not obvious
title	chart title
colors	exactly the number of colors as values in `parts.` If omitted, Color Brewer "Set2" colors are used.
size	width of the separator between blocks (defaults to `2`)
flip	flips x & y axes
reverse	reverses the order of the data
equal	by default, waffle uses `coord_equal`; this can cause layout problems, so you an use this to disable it if you are using ggsave or knitr to control output sizes (or manually sizing the chart)
pad	how many blocks to right-pad the grid with
use_glyph	use specified glyph; if using built-in Font Awesome, can be the glyph name; otherwise, it must be the unicode glyph from the custom font the caller is using.
glyph_size	size of the Font Awesome font
glyph_font, glyph_font_family	if `use_glyph` is not `FALSE`, the `gplyph_font` will be looked up in the font database and the `glpyph_font_family` used as the `family` parameter to ggplot for font display since fonts in R, Python and anythign that relies on legacy font C libraries are woefully messed up. You may need to adjust either of these "font" parameters depending on your system & OS version due to the fact that font names are different even between OS versions (sometimes). The package comes with Font Awesome and helpers for it. Use of any other fonts requires the caller to be familiar with using fonts in R. NOT ALL FONTS will work with ggplot2 and definitely not under all graphics devices for ggplot2.
legend_pos	position of legend

Details

If a data frame is used, the first two columns should contain the desired names and the values, respectively.

If the vector is not named or only partially named, capital letters will be used instead.

It is highly suggested that you limit the number of elements to plot, just like you should if you ever got wasted and decided that a regular pie chart was a good thing to create and then decide to be totally evil and make one to pollute this beautiful world of ours.

Chart title and x-axis labels are optional, especially if you'll just be exporting to another program for use/display.

If you specify a string (vs FALSE) to use_glyph the function will map the input to a Font Awesome glyph name and use that glyph for the tile instead of a block (making it more like an isotype pictogram than a waffle chart). You'll need to install Font Awesome 5 and use the extrafont package to be able to use Font Awesome 5 glyphs. Sizing is also up to the user since fonts do not automatically scale with graphic resize.

Glyph idea inspired by Ruben C. Arslan (@_r_c_a)

Note

You MUST use the Font Awesome 5 fonts bundled with the package. See install_fa_fonts().

Examples

parts <- c(80, 30, 20, 10)
waffle(parts, rows=8)

parts <- data.frame(
  names = LETTERS[1:4],
  vals = c(80, 30, 20, 10)
)

waffle(parts, rows=8)

# library(extrafont)
# waffle(parts, rows=8, use_glyph="shield")

parts <- c(One=80, Two=30, Three=20, Four=10)
chart <- waffle(parts, rows=8)
# print(chart)