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.

Answer 1

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

1. Text Labels: Use parse = T inside geom_text or annotate.
2. Axis Labels: Use expression(alpha) to get greek alpha.
3. Facet Labels: Use labeller = label_parsed inside facet.
4. 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.