geom_label


Adds text directly to the plot. geom_label draws a rectangle behind the text, making it easier to read.

Aesthetics

x, y required position aesthetics
label aesthetic that defines rendered text
alpha, angle, colour, fill, family, font face, group, hjust, vjust, line height, size classic aesthetics properties

Other Properties

parse If TRUE, the labels will be parsed into expressions and displayed as described in plotmath
nudge_x, nudge_y Horizontal and vertical adjustment to nudge labels by. Useful for offsetting text from points, particularly on discrete scales
label.padding Amount of padding around label. Defaults to 0.25 lines
label.r Radius of rounded corners. Defaults to 0.15 lines
label.size Size of label border, in mm

Similar Geometries

geom_text

Description and Details

Using the described geometry, you can insert a simple object into your data visualization – layer of text labels that are defined by positional aesthetics x, y and label (displayed string). You can find this geometry in the ribbon toolbar tab Layers, under the 2D button.

You can insert text objects into the graph using two geometries. One is geom_text and the second geom_label. The difference between them is that the geom_label renders strings in rectangles for better readability. For examples, we will use the built-in mtcars dataset. Positional aesthetic parameters are defined using the wt and mpg variables. Finally, we need to define the variable that contains the text that we want to display in visualization (label aesthetic). The result is shown in the following picture.

The most common auxiliary aesthetic properties that we use (for geom_label) are properties for text alignment – horizontal and vertical alignment. The example is shown in the following plot. The position coordinates of labels are marked by points. Subsequently, geom_label is aligned to this point. Horizontal alignment is set to right and vertical to top.

In addition, you can setup a wide range of aesthetic properties such as color, fill or size. Other properties that are specific for text layers are font family or font face. Their detailed description can be found in separate chapter. An example of a combination of their use is shown in the following graph.

In this case, we defined the color aes as white; we mapped the fill aes to categorical dataset variable. In addition, we changed the font family, size and modified several visual properties of label rectangles in that are labels displayed. Very similarly is also defined the geom_text layer. In the chapter about geom_text are also described other properties and features that you can use for geom_label geometry.