Aligning labels with ggrepel

Question

According to the most recent updates, ggrepel now supports hjust and vjust. According to the documentation, using this should align all of the labels. However, I'm unable to get the labels to align, as seen below

I have tried

library(tidyverse)
library(ggrepel)

df <- data.frame(x=seq(1:5), y=seq(1:5), label=letters[seq(1:5)])

ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  hjust=0,
                  direction='y',
                  nudge_x=0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

How can I align these labels?

EDIT

I should add that it's not just having the labels aligned, but also having them near each other, with different length connectors in order to facilitate that.

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 26 '17 at 03:01

First, as far as I understand, this is only available in the development version. So you need to install it from github:

devtools::install_github("slowkow/ggrepel")

Second, I think this only works for data points with the same x value (for hjust) or y value (for vjust).

Example:

library(tidyverse)
library(ggrepel)

df <- data.frame(x=seq(1:5), y=3, label=letters[seq(1:5)])

# not aligned
ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  # vjust=0,
                  direction='y',
                  nudge_x=0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

# aligned bottom
ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  vjust=0,
                  direction='y',
                  nudge_x=0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

# aligned top
ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  vjust=1,
                  direction='y',
                  nudge_x=0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

Interesting. Damn! I guess I'll wait to see if anyone knows a way to get all of those labels close together. If not, I'll accept this one. — Adam_G, Nov 26 '17 at 03:15

www · Answer 2 · 2017-11-26T02:59:52.147

Based on the documentation (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggrepel/vignettes/ggrepel.html), hjust is not supported in the current version (0.7.0) on CRAN.

In addition, it seems like your direction, nudge_x, and nudge_y are not associated.

I change your code slightly to the following three versions.

direction = 'y' and nudge_y = 0.1

ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  direction = 'y',
                  nudge_y = 0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

direction = 'x' and nudge_x = 0.1

ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  direction = 'x',
                  nudge_x = 0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

direction = 'both', nudge_x = 0.1, and nudge_y = 0.3

ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  direction = 'both',
                  nudge_x = 0.1,
                  nudge_y = 0.3,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

It seems to be working. The only thing I notice is that label e seems to be restricted because of the limitation in x and y-axis, so you may want to further expand the axis as follows.

ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(aes(label=label),
                  force=1, point.padding=unit(1,'lines'),
                  direction = 'y',
                  nudge_y = 0.1,
                  segment.size=0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm') +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(1, 5.5))

Thanks. But the documentation I linked to is more current than the documentation you linked to. `ggrepel` does support `hjust` and `vjust`. I appreciate the thoroughness of your answer, though. — Adam_G, Nov 26 '17 at 02:46
Interesting. It seems like the version on CRAN (`0.7.0`) does not support `hjust`, while the version on git (`0.7.1`) supports `hjust`. I am using `0.7.0` and when I ran the code with `hjust` the condole returns `Warning: Ignoring unknown parameters: hjust`. Anyway, I think the key is the `direction` and `nudge` argument need to be the same. — www, Nov 26 '17 at 02:53
Yeh, I had to download the github version using devtools. I got the same warning you did before. — Adam_G, Nov 26 '17 at 02:58

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 26 '17 at 03:38

Not sure what exactly your goal here is. If you want all the labels on one side, it may be easier to just draw them manually rather than using ggrepel.

df <- data.frame(x=seq(1:5), y=seq(1:5), label=letters[seq(1:5)])

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = y)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text(aes(x = max(x) + 0.1, y = y, label=label), hjust = 0, vjust = 0.5) +
  geom_segment(aes(x = x + 0.04, xend = max(x) + 0.06, y = y, yend = y), size = 0.2) +
  geom_smooth(method='lm')

Aligning labels with ggrepel

3 Answers3