1. Introduction

ggstar provides geoms for ggplot2 to create more easily discernible shapes:

geom_star

p1 <- show_starshapes()
p1

And the default is: c(1, 13, 15, 11, 12, 14, 29, 2, 27)[seq_len(n)]. n is the number of shapes you want to use.

2. Install

ggstar has been submitted on CRAN, you can use the following to install it.

# Release
install.packages("ggstar")

# Or for devel
if(!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly=TRUE)){
    install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("xiangpin/ggstar")

3. Usage

geom_star is similar to geom_point of ggplot2. The difference point is geom_star use starshape to mapping the starshapes. The another is geom_star use scale_starshape_manual for manual scale. And the shapes will be not distorted on cartesian coordinates or polar coordinates.

3.1 Cartesian coordinates

library(ggplot2)
library(ggstar)
p2 <- ggplot(data=iris, aes(x=Sepal.Width,y=Sepal.Length)) + 
      geom_star(aes(starshape=Species, fill=Species), size=2.5) +
      scale_fill_manual(values=c("#E41A1C", "#377EB8", "#4DAF4A")) +
      theme(legend.spacing.y = unit(0.02, "cm"))
p2

3.2 Polar coordinates

p3 <- ggplot(data=mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) +
      geom_star(aes(fill=cyl), size=2.5) +
      scale_fill_gradient(low="blue", high="red") +
      coord_polar() +
      theme(panel.border=element_blank(),
            legend.spacing.y = unit(0.02, "cm"))
p3

3.3 interactive

library(ggiraph)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggstar)
mtcars$name <- rownames(mtcars)
p4 <- ggplot(
        data = mtcars, 
        mapping = aes(
          x = wt, 
          y = mpg, 
          fill = cyl,
          tooltip = paste0("name: ", name,"\nqsec: ", qsec,"\ndrat: ",drat), 
          data_id = name
        )
      ) +
      geom_star_interactive(size = 3.5) +
      scale_fill_viridis_c()
      
girafe(
  ggobj = p4,
  options = list(
    opts_hover(css = "fill:yellow;stroke:black;stroke-width:1.5px;"),
    opts_zoom = opts_zoom(min = .7, max = 4),
    opts_tooltip(use_fill = TRUE),
    opts_sizing(width = .7),
    opts_toolbar = opts_toolbar(saveaspng = FALSE, delay_mouseout = 5000)
  )
)

4. Need helps?

If you have questions/issues, please visit github issue tracker.

5. Session information

Here is the output of sessionInfo() on the system on which this document was compiled:

## R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /mnt/d/UbuntuApps/R/4.5.0/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so 
## LAPACK: /mnt/d/UbuntuApps/R/4.5.0/lib/R/lib/libRlapack.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.1
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## time zone: Asia/Shanghai
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ggiraph_0.9.1 ggstar_1.0.6  ggplot2_4.0.0
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] gtable_0.3.6       jsonlite_2.0.0     dplyr_1.1.4        compiler_4.5.0    
##  [5] tidyselect_1.2.1   Rcpp_1.1.0         gridExtra_2.3      jquerylib_0.1.4   
##  [9] systemfonts_1.2.3  scales_1.4.0       uuid_1.2-1         yaml_2.3.10       
## [13] fastmap_1.2.0      R6_2.6.1           labeling_0.4.3     generics_0.1.4    
## [17] knitr_1.50         htmlwidgets_1.6.4  tibble_3.3.0       bslib_0.9.0       
## [21] pillar_1.11.0      RColorBrewer_1.1-3 rlang_1.1.6        cachem_1.1.0      
## [25] xfun_0.53          sass_0.4.10        S7_0.2.0           viridisLite_0.4.2 
## [29] cli_3.6.5          withr_3.0.2        magrittr_2.0.3     digest_0.6.37     
## [33] grid_4.5.0         lifecycle_1.0.4    vctrs_0.6.5        evaluate_1.0.5    
## [37] glue_1.8.0         farver_2.1.2       prettydoc_0.4.1    rmarkdown_2.29    
## [41] purrr_1.1.0        tools_4.5.0        pkgconfig_2.0.3    htmltools_0.5.8.1