// the take
ggpomological is a ggplot2 extension that gives plots a fruit-watercolor aesthetic: a themed color palette, matching discrete scales, and an optional paper-texture background. It's for R users who want a distinctive, illustrative look for presentations or blog posts rather than a general-purpose analytical theme.
The palette isn't arbitrary — colors and background texture are pulled directly from the USDA Pomological Watercolors archive, so the aesthetic has a real source behind it. paint_pomological() actually composites a textured paper background via magick instead of faking it with CSS/SVG tricks. The three theme variants (plain, paper, fancy) let you adopt the look incrementally — you can take the color scale without committing to custom fonts or a background image.
Not on CRAN, so installation is devtools::install_github only — no CRAN dependency resolution, no update notifications, more brittle in reproducible pipelines. paint_pomological() pulls in magick, which means an ImageMagick system library dependency; that's a real headache on Docker images or Shiny Server deploys that don't already have it. theme_pomological_fancy() depends on Google Fonts (Homemade Apple, etc.) that aren't bundled with the package — the README itself warns you'll get a pile of font warnings if they're not installed locally. No commits since early 2022, and the discrete color scale is capped at a small, fixed set of colors with no continuous scale support — both listed as 'future' work in the README that never happened.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →