20.4 New coords

At its most basic, the coord is responsible for rescaling the position aesthetics into a [0, 1] range, potentially transforming them in the process. The only place where you might call any methods from a coord is in a geoms draw_*() method where the transform() method is called on the data to turn the position data into the right format before creating grobs from it. The most common (and default) is CoordCartesian, which simply rescales the position data:

print(CoordCartesian$transform)
#> <ggproto method>
#>   <Wrapper function>
#>     function (...) 
#> f(...)
#> 
#>   <Inner function (f)>
#>     function (data, panel_params) 
#> {
#>     data <- transform_position(data, panel_params$x$rescale, 
#>         panel_params$y$rescale)
#>     transform_position(data, squish_infinite, squish_infinite)
#> }

Apart from this seemingly simple use, coords have a lot of responsibility and power that extension developers can leverage, but which is probably best left alone. Coords takes care of rendering the axes, axis labels, and panel foreground and background and it can intercept both the layer data and facet layout and modify it. Still, with the introduction of coord_sf() there is little need for new coords as most non-cartography usecases are captured with existing coords, and coord_sf() supports all the various projections needed in cartography.