Clip lines to plot area and display text outside plot area

Question

I want to restrict the visible y-range of my plot. In order to retain values that fall outside this range I need to set oob (out of bounds) to rescale_none and this works well.

However I would also like to add some text in the margins outside the plot. In order to do this I need to turn off clipping. This has the effect that values that are out-of-bounds are plotted outside the plot area in the margins.

Is there anyway to plot text in margins and clip values to plot region?

#  Data
set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame( x=1:100,y=rnorm(100,mean=1,sd=1) )
# Basic plot

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(grid)

g <- ggplot(df)+
geom_line(aes(x,y))


#  Values exceeding scale limits are dropped
g1 <- g + scale_y_continuous( limits = c(0,2) )

OOB values dropped

#  This is what I want
g2 <- g + scale_y_continuous( limits = c(0,2) , oob = rescale_none )

enter image description here

#  ...But, I would like to plot some text outside the plotting region
#  and need to turn off clipping to get the text to display...
g3 <- g + scale_y_continuous( limits = c(0,2) , oob = rescale_none ) +
    # Some text to sit above the plot
    geom_text( aes(label = "Nonsense", y = Inf, x = 0), hjust = 0, vjust = -1) +
    # Add some space for the text
    theme(plot.margin = unit(c(2,1,1,1), "lines")) 

#  Turning off clipping makes geom_line also go outside plot area...
#  See here for clipping... http://stackoverflow.com/a/12417481/1478381
g4 <- ggplot_gtable(ggplot_build(g3))
g4$layout$clip[g4$layout$name == "panel"] <- "off"

grid.draw(g4)

enter image description here

hm, the only other thing I've done similar is to create another plot with just the text and sort of stack the two together. I'm sure that wizard @baptiste would know of something — rawr, Mar 12 '15 at 15:23

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

4

With an approach from here, here's my solution:

library(gtable)
gg <- ggplotGrob(g2)
gg <- gtable_add_grob(gg, textGrob("Nonsense", x=0, hjust=0), t=1, l=4)
grid.draw(gg)

enter image description here

edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

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answered Mar 13 '15 at 08:41

tonytonov

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I have run into the same issue except my 'Nonsense' has to be in the middle which I figured out byt changing t and l value. However I need it to be a different color form the ORIGINAL title!! That is what's puzzling me – zazu Mar 31 '16 at 21:49

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 25 '18 at 11:09

Use ggplot2::labs(). The last version of ggplot2 includes this function to print title, subtitle and captions on each graph.

p = ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt, colour = cyl)) + geom_point() p + labs(colour = "Cylinders") p + labs(x = "New x label", title='Plot title', caption='Source: IMF.')

Source: https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2/pull/1582

Clip lines to plot area and display text outside plot area

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