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How to Use Themes

Timothée Giraud

2026-01-09

Source: vignettes/how_to_use_themes.Rmd
how_to_use_themes.Rmd

mf_theme() sets a map theme. A theme is a set of graphical parameters that are applied to maps created with mapsf.
These parameters are:

  • figure margins and frames,
  • background, foreground and highlight colors,
  • default sequential and qualitative palettes,
  • title options (position, size, banner…).

mapsf offers some builtin themes. It’s possible to modify an existing theme or to start a theme from scratch. Themes are persistent across maps produced by mapsf (e.g. they survive a dev.off() call).

Builtin themes

Here are the builtin themes.

How to modify an existing theme

It is possible to modify an existing theme. In this example we use the “base” theme and modify some title parameters.

library(mapsf)
mtq <- mf_get_mtq()
mf_theme("base", title_banner = TRUE, title_font = 4)
mf_map(mtq)
mf_title('Mofified "default" theme')

How to create a new theme

It is possible to create a new theme from scratch.

mf_theme(
  mar          = c(0.1, 0.1, 1.85, 0.1),
  title_tab    = FALSE,
  title_pos    = "left",
  title_inner  = FALSE,
  title_line   = 1.75,
  title_cex    = 1.25,
  title_font   = 4,
  title_banner = FALSE,
  foreground   = "#F1F0E9",
  background   = "white",
  highlight    = "#E9762B",
  frame        = "map",
  frame_lwd    = 4,
  pal_quali    = "Dark 3",
  pal_seq      = colorRampPalette(c("#F1F0E9", "#41644A", "#0D4715"))
)
mf_map(mtq, "MED", "choro")
mf_title("New theme")

It is also possible to assign a theme to a variable.

blue_theme <- mf_theme("base", background = "lightblue")
green_theme <- mf_theme("base", background = "lightgreen")
mf_theme(blue_theme)
mf_map(mtq)
mf_title("Blue Theme")

mf_theme(green_theme)
mf_map(mtq)
mf_title("Green Theme")

Legacy themes

Although the map theming system has been radically changed in version 1.0.0 of the package, you can still use the old themes by referencing them by name.

mf_theme("default")
mf_map(mtq)
mf_title("Legacy default theme")