Discrete palettes for gratia plots — gratia

Create a palette function for ggplot2 theme settings. The default preserves gratia's existing nine-colour Okabe-Ito palette and hue fallback.

Usage

gratia_palette(name = "default", reverse = FALSE)

Arguments

name: Palette name: "default", "tol_bright", "tol_vibrant", "tol_muted", "tol_dark", "tol_banded_12", "tol_banded_16", or "tol_banded_20".
reverse: Logical; reverse the palette order?

Value

A function taking the number of colours and returning a character vector of hexadecimal colours.

Details

Tol's bright and vibrant palettes contain seven colours, muted contains nine, and dark contains eleven. The dark palette favours visibility against white over separation between colours. Banded palettes provide 12, 16 or 20 colours; neighbouring shades become less distinct as the palette grows. These are optional choices and do not change gratia's defaults.

Finite palettes use the published order, returning the first requested colours. They error if their capacity is exceeded; they never recycle or interpolate colours. The default palette uses hue colours above nine levels. Set both colour and fill palettes to keep grouped curves and ribbons paired.

Definitions follow Paul Tol's colour schemes as published in August 2026. The banded schemes are derived from his sequential schemes for use when larger sets of colours are required. See https://sronpersonalpages.nl/~pault/ for the definitions and examples.

Examples

pal <- gratia_palette("tol_muted")
pal(5)
#> [1] "#CC6677" "#332288" "#DDCC77" "#117733" "#88CCEE"
ggplot2::theme(
  palette.colour.discrete = pal,
  palette.fill.discrete = pal
)
#> <theme> List of 2
#>  $ palette.colour.discrete:function (n)  
#>  $ palette.fill.discrete  :function (n)  
#>  @ complete: logi FALSE
#>  @ validate: logi TRUE