Left justify text from multi-line facet labels

Question

I\'m using facet_grid() to display some data, and I have facet labels that span multiple lines of text (they contain the "\\n" character).

require(g         


        

Answer 1

There may be a cleaner way to do this but I didn't find a way to do this within ggplot2. The padwrap function could be more generalized as it basically does just what you requested. To get the justification right, I had to use a mono-spaced font.

# Wrap text with embedded newlines: space padded and lef justified.
# There may be a cleaner way to do this but this works on the one
# example.  If using for ggplot2 plots, make the font `family`
# a monospaced font (e.g. 'Courier')
padwrap <- function(x) {
    # Operates on one string
    padwrap_str <- function(s) {
        sres    <- strsplit(s, "\n")
        max_len <- max(nchar(sres[[1]]))
        paste( sprintf(paste0('%-', max_len, 's'), sres[[1]]), collapse = "\n" )
    }
    # Applys 'padwrap' to a vector of strings
    unlist(lapply(x, padwrap_str))
}

require(ggplot2)

facet_label_text = rep(c("Label A",
                         "Label B\nvery long label",
                         "Label C\nshort",
                         "Label D"), 5)
new_facet_label_text <- padwrap(facet_label_text)

#Generate example data
set.seed(3)
df = data.frame(facet_label_text = new_facet_label_text,
                time = rep(c(0, 4, 8, 12, 16), times = 4),
                value = runif(20, min=0, max=100))

#Plot test data
ggplot(df, aes(x = time, y = value)) +
    geom_line() +
    facet_grid(facet_label_text ~ .) +
    theme(strip.text.y = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0, family = 'Courier'))

The strip text is left justified in the image below