ggrastr package

Provides set of geoms to rasterize only specific layers of the plot (e.g. large scatterplots) keeping all labels and text in vector format. Allows to keep your plots within the reasonable size limit without loosing vector properties of the scale-sensitive information.

Installation

install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('VPetukhov/ggrastr')

New geoms:

• geom_point_rast: raster scatterplots
• geom_jitter_rast: raster jittered scatterplots
• geom_boxplot_jitter: boxplots that allows to jitter and rasterize outlier points
• geom_tile_rast: raster heatmap
• geom_beeswarm_rast: raster bee swarm plots
• geom_quasirandom: raster quasirandom scatterplot

For more details see vignette.

Troubleshooting

If your rsession crashes when you try to render rasterized plot, probably your version of Cairo was built for another version of R (see Upgrading to a new version of R). To check if you use a proper version run the command below and ensure that “Built” version is the same as your R version.

pkgs <- as.data.frame(installed.packages(), stringsAsFactors = F, row.names = F)
pkgs[pkgs$Package == 'Cairo', c("Package", "LibPath", "Version", "Built")]

To ensure that your Cairo works, just run Cairo::Cairo(type='raster'); dev.off() and check if it crashes R session.