I have to draw a 20 plots and horizontally place a legends in each plots. I gave the following command for the first plot: plot(x=1:4,y=1:4) legend("bottom",legend = c("a","b","c","d"),horiz=TRUE,text.font=2,cex=0.64) then for the second plot I tried : plot(x=1:2,y=1:2) legend("bottom",legend = c("a","b"),horiz=TRUE,text.font=2,cex=0.64) But because the size of the character vector passed to legend argument are different I get the size of the legend different. Since I have to plot so many different plots having varying sizes of legends,I would want to do it in an automated fashion. Is there a way to do this which can fix the size of the legend in all the plots and fit it to graph size?