/blog/2022/06/23/long-labels-ggplot/

[andrewheiss]

Quick and easy ways to deal with long labels in ggplot2 | Andrew Heiss
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2022/06/23/long-labels-ggplot/

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by andreashandel on 2022-09-12 13:33:36

Hi Andrew, I just happened to need this and was trying to implement, but
got a bit stuck. In my case, I need special expressions (e.g. Greek
letters) on the labels. I can't figure out to combine that with the
label_wrap() command. Do you happen to know how to do that? Here is a
small reprex. In the example below, I'd like to line-break x and y-axes
and the variable labels. So far, haven't had much luck, figured maybe
you know:

## ---- packages --------
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)

## ---- createdata --------
N = 100 #sample size
# made-up data
df <- data.frame(BMI = runif(N,15,50),
STATUS = as.factor(rbinom(N,3,prob=0.4)),
Y = rnorm(N,100,10) )

# giving the STATUS variable some silly labels
status_labels <- c(expression(paste("Healthy male, receiving ", Omega[2], " treatment") ),
expression(paste("Immunocompromised male, not receiving ", Omega[2], " treatment")),
expression(paste("Healthy female: No ❤ problems")),
expression(paste("Everyone else who doesn't fit into the other categories." )) )

## ---- plot0 --------
p0 <- ggplot(df) + geom_boxplot(aes(x = STATUS, y = Y)) +
geom_point(aes(x = STATUS, y = Y,color = BMI)) +
labs(x = expression(paste("Patient status according to ", Omega[2], " treatment, ❤-condition and other factors"))) +
labs(y = expression(paste("Response after ", 21^2," days excluding those days on which it didn't rain."))) +
scale_x_discrete(labels = parse(text=status_labels))
plot(p0)\

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted on 2022-09-12 17:49:41

It seems that `label_wrap()` and `str_wrap()` aren't compatible
with `expression()`. However, you can fake it if you use ggtext since
it can parse a subset of HTML tags like <sub> and <sup>!

Here's a reprex:
https://gist.github.com/and...

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by andreashandel on 2022-09-12 18:22:59

Thanks! Not quite as elegant as label_wrap() but it works (at least for
my use case)! Feel free to add this to your post or make a new one :)

[IrshadUlHaq1]

This is a great way to handle this very common challenge. I wonder if there is a way to do the same for facet_wrap labels without increasing the width of figure?

[andrewheiss]

Yep! You can use ggplot2::label_wrap_gen() for that without needing anything from {scales}:

library(tidyverse)

df <- tibble(
  x = rnorm(100),
  y = rnorm(100),
  facet = rep(paste0("Here's a really long label ", 1:2), each = 50)
)

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = y)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap(vars(facet), labeller = labeller(facet = label_wrap_gen(20)))

[ngreifer]

Came across this nice post today and wanted to add a modification to the rotated labels version that I think can look quite nice, which is to have the end of each label align with the axis tic by setting hjust = 0, as follows:

ggplot(essential_by_category,
       aes(x = CATEGORY, y = total)) +
  geom_col() +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = comma) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = "Total projects") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1))

Loved this post and I learned something new! Just wanted to add another option I have found useful.