Ribbon

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Ribbon plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/ribbon?lang=en

The ribbon diagram is a pattern similar to a ribbon.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggplot2; ggthemes

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggplot2", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggplot2")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggthemes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggthemes")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version date (UTC) lib source
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 ggplot2    * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [1] RSPM
 ggthemes   * 5.2.0   2025-11-30 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

The loaded data are the X-axis values and their corresponding Y-axis values and groups.

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/ribbon/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
colnames(data) <- c("group", "xvalue", "yvalue1", "yvalue2")
data$yvalue <- (data$yvalue1 + data$yvalue2) / 2

# View data
head(data)

   group xvalue yvalue1 yvalue2 yvalue
1 Group1   1900  -0.279  -0.063 -0.171
2 Group1   1901  -0.271  -0.053 -0.162
3 Group1   1902  -0.285  -0.069 -0.177
4 Group1   1903  -0.303  -0.095 -0.199
5 Group1   1904  -0.328  -0.118 -0.223
6 Group1   1905  -0.348  -0.134 -0.241

Visualization

# Ribbon
p <- ggplot(data, aes(xvalue, yvalue, fill = group)) +
  geom_ribbon(alpha = 0.2, aes(ymin = yvalue1, ymax = yvalue2)) +
  geom_line(aes(y = yvalue, color = group), lwd = 1) +
  geom_line(aes(y = yvalue1, color = group), linetype = "dotted") +
  geom_line(aes(y = yvalue2, color = group), linetype = "dotted") +
  ylab("y axis value") +
  xlab("x axis value") +
  ggtitle("Ribbon Plot") +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#e04d39","#5bbad6")) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("#e04d39","#5bbad6")) +
  theme_stata() +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "Arial"),
        plot.title = element_text(size = 12,hjust = 0.5),
        axis.title = element_text(size = 12),
        axis.text = element_text(size = 10),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0.5,vjust = 1),
        legend.position = "right",
        legend.direction = "vertical",
        legend.title = element_text(size = 10),
        legend.text = element_text(size = 10))
 
p

Each color represents a different grouping, through which broken lines can be seen the change of each group of data over time.