ggplot2: yaxis labels not aligning across facets

Question

I\'m having some trouble aligning axis labels across facets in ggplot. I\'m trying to left align all of the y-axis labels to make the text look more uniform, but the moment the

Answer 1

You can pad the labels out to the length of the longest string and then display them in a fixed-width font:

max_width = max(nchar(as.character(test$label)))
test$label_padded = sprintf(paste0("%-", max_width, "s"), test$label)

# (Ignore this if not on Windows)
windowsFonts(Consolas = "Consolas")
ggplot(test, aes(x = xdum, y = label_padded, label = data)) + 
    facet_grid(facett~., scales = "free", space = "free") + 
    geom_tile() + 
    theme(axis.ticks = element_blank(), 
          axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 0, family = "Consolas"))