How to make geom_text plot within the canvas's bounds

Question

Using geom_text to label outlying points of scatter plot. By definition, these points tend to be close to the canvas edges: there is usually at least one word that overlaps

Answer 1

ggplot 2.0.0 introduced new options for hjust and vjust for geom_text() that may help with clipping, especially "inward". We could do:

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=n.wheels, y=utility, label=word))  + 
  geom_text(vjust="inward",hjust="inward")

Answer 2

You can turn off clipping. For your example it works just great.

p <- ggplot(data=df, aes(x=n.wheels, y=utility, label=word))  + geom_text() 
gt <- ggplot_gtable(ggplot_build(p))
gt$layout$clip[gt$layout$name == "panel"] <- "off"
grid::grid.draw(gt)

Answer 3

I'm sure someone could come up with a way to program this a bit faster, but here's an answer that could be used especially with multiple facets that all have different ranges - I modified the data.frame to have two facets on different x and y scales:

df <- data.frame(word = c("bicycle", "tricycle", "quadricycle"),
                 n.wheels = c(2,3,4, .2, .3, .4),
                 utility = c(10,6,7, 1, .6, .7),
                 facet = rep(c("one", "two"), each = 3))

Then, I create a dummy data frame that determines the breadth of the range x and y for each facet (e.g., diff(range(n.wheels))), divides that breadth by a suitable number (depending on the length of your labels, I chose 8), and adds that padding to the minimum and maximum x- and y-value for each facet:

pad <- rbind(ddply(df, .(facet), summarize,
             n.wheels = min(n.wheels) - diff(range(n.wheels))/8, 
             utility = min(utility) - diff(range(utility))/8),
ddply(df, .(facet), summarize,
             n.wheels = max(n.wheels) + diff(range(n.wheels))/8,
             utility = max(utility) + diff(range(utility))/8))
pad$word <- NA

Then, you can add that layer to your plot with the colour set as NA:

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=n.wheels, y=utility, label = word))  + 
   geom_text() + 
   geom_point(data = pad, aes(x = n.wheels, y = utility), colour = NA) +
   facet_wrap(~facet, ncol = 1, scales = "free") 

Result: a reproducible, "automated" plot without cut-off labels (you may choose later to alter the scales to be prettier...)

Answer 4

I think this is a good use for expand in scale_continuous:

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=n.wheels, y=utility, label=word))  + geom_text() + 
    scale_x_continuous(expand = c(.1, .1))

It pads your data (multiplicatively and additively) to calculate the scale limits. Unless you have really long words, bumping it up just a little from the defaults will probably be enough. See ?expand_scale for more info, and additional options, such as expanding just the upper or lower range of the axis. From the examples at the bottom of ?expand_scale, it looks like the defaults are an additive 0.6 for discrete scales, and a multiplicative 0.05 for continuous scales.