Unable to render plot when combining paginated plots with empty facets

[pormr]

Background: I am working with several faceted plots which I need to split into multiple slides to avoid overplotting, while ensuring that facets/subplots from the same group (i.e., the facetting variables) are aligned in parallel. To accomplish this, I used ggforce::facet_wrap_paginate to draw the contents of each page and stitch them together using patchwork grammar within a loop. This method works perfectly when the total number of facets is a multiple of the facets per page. However, it fails to render the final page properly when the number of facets is not divisible by the facets per page. It created a new page but draw nothing.

A similar issue was reported in #273, which has been marked as resolved at commit 94f04c42f2e8f90456b0f063e3a93336d17485db. I am currently using the latest versions of patchwork and ggforce available through Conda.

Minimal reprex:

---

library(ggplot2)
library(ggforce)
library(patchwork)

p1_1 <- ggplot(diamonds, mapping = aes(x = carat, y = price)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap_paginate(vars(cut), nrow = 1, ncol = 3, page = 1) +
  theme_classic()

p2_1 <- ggplot(diamonds, mapping = aes(x = x, y = price)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap_paginate(vars(cut), nrow = 1, ncol = 3, page = 1) +
  xlab("length") +
  theme_classic()

p1_1 / p2_1

p1_2 <- ggplot(diamonds, mapping = aes(x = carat, y = price)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap_paginate(vars(cut), nrow = 1, ncol = 3, page = 2) +
  theme_classic()

p2_2 <- ggplot(diamonds, mapping = aes(x = x, y = price)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap_paginate(vars(cut), nrow = 1, ncol = 3, page = 2) +
  xlab("length") +
  theme_classic()

p1_2 / p2_2

No plot was generated here.

GridExtra has no issue combining the plot (yet unable to align the y-axis properly in my case).

gridExtra::grid.arrange(p1_2, p2_2, nrow = 2)

^{Created on 2025-04-25 with reprex v2.1.1}

Session info

sessionInfo()
#> Warning: Your system is mis-configured: '/etc/localtime' is not a symlink
#> Warning: '/etc/localtime' is not identical to any known timezone file
#> R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
#> Platform: x86_64-conda-linux-gnu
#> Running under: CentOS Linux 8
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS/LAPACK: <conda_prefix>/lib/libopenblasp-r0.3.29.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
#> 
#> locale:
#>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
#>  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
#>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
#>  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
#>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
#> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
#> 
#> time zone: NA
#> tzcode source: system (glibc)
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> other attached packages:
#> [1] patchwork_1.3.0 ggforce_0.4.2   ggplot2_3.5.1  
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] vctrs_0.6.5       cli_3.6.4         knitr_1.50        rlang_1.1.5      
#>  [5] xfun_0.51         generics_0.1.3    labeling_0.4.3    glue_1.8.0       
#>  [9] colorspace_2.1-1  htmltools_0.5.8.1 gridExtra_2.3     scales_1.3.0     
#> [13] rmarkdown_2.29    tweenr_2.0.3      grid_4.4.2        evaluate_1.0.3   
#> [17] munsell_0.5.1     tibble_3.2.1      MASS_7.3-64       fastmap_1.2.0    
#> [21] yaml_2.3.10       lifecycle_1.0.4   compiler_4.4.2    dplyr_1.1.4      
#> [25] polyclip_1.10-7   fs_1.6.5          Rcpp_1.0.14       pkgconfig_2.0.3  
#> [29] rstudioapi_0.17.1 farver_2.1.2      digest_0.6.37     R6_2.6.1         
#> [33] tidyselect_1.2.1  reprex_2.1.1      pillar_1.10.1     magrittr_2.0.3   
#> [37] tools_4.4.2       withr_3.0.2       gtable_0.3.6