ggplot2: color individual words in title to match colors of groups

Question

I recently saw a line chart in the Economist where the title had colored words to match the colors of the groups used in the line chart. I was wondering how to do this with

Answer 1

Here's a simple and more general way using the ggtext package

produced with:

library(ggtext) 

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, color = Species)) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(
    name = NULL,
    values = c(setosa = "#0072B2", virginica = "#009E73", versicolor = "#D55E00"),
    labels = c(
      setosa = "I. setosa",
      virginica = "I. virginica",
      versicolor = "I. versicolor")
  ) +
  labs(
    title = "**Fisher's *Iris* dataset**  
    Sepal width vs. sepal length for 
    setosa, 
    versicolor, and
    virginica
    ",
    x = "Sepal length (cm)", y = "Sepal width (cm)"
  ) +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(
    plot.title = element_markdown(lineheight = 1.1),
    legend.text = element_markdown(size = 11)
  )