R: ggplot2, can I set the plot title to wrap around and shrink the text to fit the plot?

Question

library(ggplot2)

my_title = \"This is a really long title of a plot that I want to nicely wrap \\n and fit onto the plot without having to manually add the backslas         


        

Answer 1

Just for an update as has been mentioned in the comments opts is deprecated. You need to use labs and you could do:

library(ggplot2)

my_title = "This is a really long title of a plot that I want to nicely wrap \n and fit onto the plot without having to manually add the backslash n, but at the moment it does not"

Option 1: Using str_wrap option from the stringr package and setting your ideal width:

 library(stringr)
 ggplot(data = cars, aes(x = speed, y = dist)) +
      geom_smooth() +
      labs(title = str_wrap(my_title, 60))

Option 2: Using the function provided by @Richie https://stackoverflow.com/a/3935429/4767610 like this:

wrapper <- function(x, ...) 
{
  paste(strwrap(x, ...), collapse = "\n")
}
ggplot(data = cars, aes(x = speed, y = dist)) +
      geom_smooth() +
      labs(title = wrapper(my_title, 60))

Option 3: Using the manual option (granted, this is what the OP wanted to avoid but it might be handy)

my_title_manual = "This is a really long title of a plot that I want to nicely wrap \n and fit onto the plot without having to manually add \n the backslash n, but at the moment it does not"

 ggplot(data = cars, aes(x = speed, y = dist)) +
          geom_smooth() +
          labs(title = my_title_manual)

Option 4: Reduce the text size of the title (as in the accepted answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/2633773/4767610)

ggplot(data = cars, aes(x = speed, y = dist)) +
  geom_smooth() +
  labs(title = my_title) +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 10))