How to use Greek symbols in ggplot2

Question

My categories need to be named with Greek letters   I am using ggplot2  and it works beautifully with the data   Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to put those greek symbols on the x axis  at the tick marks  and also make them appear in the legend   Is there any way to do it   UPDATE  I had a look at the link  however  there is no good method described to accomplish what I want to do

User · Answer

Use expression delta  where  delta  for lowercase d and  Delta  to get capital      Here s full list of Greek characters        a   alpha          beta    G    gamma      d  delta      e  epsilon         zeta         eta   T     theta         iota         kappa         lambda          mu         nu         xi         omicron     p   pi         rho   S s   sigma     t   tau         upsilon   F f   phi         chi         psi   O     omega   EDIT  Copied from comments  when using in conjunction with other words use like  expression Delta  price

User · Answer

Simplest solution  Use Unicode Characters  No expression or other packages needed  Not sure if this is a newer feature for ggplot  but it works  It also makes it easy to mix Greek and regular text  like adding     to the ticks   Just use unicode characters within the text string  seems to work well for all options I can think of  Edit  previously it did not work in facet labels  This has apparently been fixed at some point     library ggplot2  ggplot mtcars          aes mpg  disp  color factor gear         geom point        labs title  Title   u03b1  u03a9      works fine        x    u03b1  u03a9 x-axis title        works fine        y    u03b1  u03a9 y-axis title        works fine        color   u03b1  u03a9 Groups         works fine   scale x continuous breaks   seq 10  35  5                         labels   paste0 seq 10  35  5     u03a9         works fine  to label the ticks   ggrepel  geom text repel aes label   paste rownames mtcars     u03a9      size  3      works fine    facet grid  paste0 gear    Gears  u03a9        Created on 2019-08-28 by the reprex package  v0 3 0

User · Answer

Here is a link to an excellent wiki that explains how to put greek symbols in ggplot2  In summary  here is what you do to obtain greek symbols   Text Labels  Use parse   T inside geom text or annotate  Axis Labels  Use expression alpha  to get greek alpha  Facet Labels  Use labeller   label parsed inside facet  Legend Labels  Use bquote alpha      value   in legend label    You can see detailed usage of these options in the link  EDIT  The objective of using greek symbols along the tick marks can be achieved as follows  require ggplot2   data tips   p0   qplot sex  data   tips  geom    bar    p1   p0   scale x discrete labels   c  Female    expression alpha                                          Male      expression beta     print p1     For complete documentation on the various symbols that are available when doing this and how to use them  see  plotmath

User · Answer

You do not need the latex2exp package to do what you wanted to do  The following code would do the trick    ggplot smr  aes Fuel Rate  Eng Speed Ave   color Eng Speed Max         geom point        labs title expression  Fuel Efficiency   alpha Omega     color expression alpha Omega   x expression Delta price       Also  some comments  unanswered as of this point  asked about putting an asterisk     after a Greek letter  expression alpha      works  so I suggest giving it a try   More comments asked about getting   Price and I find the most straightforward way to achieve that is expression Delta price    If you need to add something before the Greek letter  you can also do this  expression Indicative Delta price  which gets you

[r] How to use Greek symbols in ggplot2?

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