Multiple Lines for Text per Legend Label in ggplot2

Benjamin Telkamp picture Benjamin Telkamp · Nov 1, 2017 · Viewed 19.9k times · Source

I'm trying to deal with very long labels for a legend in a bar plot (see picture included and the code i used to produce it. I need to break them down in multiple (rows of) lines (2 or 3), other wise the whole picture will be to wide. Some help would be very helpful. Actually I also suspect that my code is not as concise as it should be, but at least it works (but feel free to change)

enter image description here

glimpse(df)

Observations: 301
Variables: 3
$ V12n     <int> 1, 4, 4, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1...
$ V12      <fctr> De verwijzer neemt contact op om na te gaa...
$ METING.f <fctr> Meting 0, Meting 0, Meting 0, Meting 0, Me...

p = ggplot(df, aes(x = V12n, fill = V12)) + 
 geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/tapply(..count..,..PANEL..,sum)
 [..PANEL..])) + 
 scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent) + 
 geom_text(aes(y = ((..count..)/sum(..count..)), 
               label = scales::percent((..count..)/tapply(..count..,..PANEL..,sum)[..PANEL..])), 
               stat = "count", vjust = -0.25) +
 facet_grid(.~ METING.f) +
 labs(title = " ",
   x = "Vraag 12",
   y = "Percentage")  +
 theme(axis.text.x = element_blank(),
       axis.ticks.x=element_blank()) +
 scale_fill_manual(values = c("greenyellow", "green4", "darkorange1", "red"), 
                name = "Zijn er afspraken gemaakt over het overdragen van de verantwoordelijkheid naar de volgende zorgverlener?\n") 

 p

Answer

eipi10 picture eipi10 · Nov 1, 2017

You can use str_wrap for automated wrapping of long strings or you can hard code breaks by adding \n (the line break character) to a string. To add space between the legend keys, you can use the legend.key.height theme element. Here's an example with the built-in iris data frame:

library(stringr)
library(tidyverse)

# Create long labels to be wrapped
iris$Species = paste(iris$Species, 
                     "random text to make the labels much much longer than the original labels")

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, colour=str_wrap(Species,20))) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(colour="Long title shortened\nwith wrapping") +
  theme(legend.key.height=unit(2, "cm"))

enter image description here