Using different font styles in annotate (ggplot2)

Question

I'm using the code below to generate a simple chart with some annotations:

require(ggplot2); data(mtcars)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + 
  geom_point() +
  annotate("text", x = 4, y = 25, label = "This should be bold\nand this not",
           colour = "red") +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 3.2, colour = "red")

On that chart I would like to apply bold font to the first part of the phrase in the text annotation:

This should be bold

but the I wish for the remaining part of the text to remain unaltered with respect to the font face and style.

you are probably best off splitting it into two call, and adding fontface="bold" to one — jeremycg, Jul 22 '15 at 16:35

score 58 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 05 '16 at 10:04

If you don't have a problem with splitting it up in two annotations, you could just do:

annotate("text", x = 4, y = 25, label = "This should be bold",
       colour = "red", fontface =2)+
annotate("text", x = 4, y = 24, label = "and this not",
       colour = "red")

score 41 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 22 '15 at 16:52

41

How about using plotmath syntax with parse = TRUE:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + 
    geom_point() +
    annotate("text", x = 4, y = 25, 
            label = 'atop(bold("This should be bold"),"this should not")',
            colour = "red", parse = TRUE) +
    geom_vline(xintercept = 3.2, colour = "red")

answered Jul 22 '15 at 16:52

aosmith

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How to manage a situation where I have three lines of text, first one with a date should be bold and two lines below it should be printed with a standard font. – Konrad Jul 28 '15 at 10:37
2

@Konrad While it might depend on what all this info was that I wanted added to the plot, I would probably make each line a row in a data.frame or something and use `tableGrob` and `annotation_custom` to place it on the graphic where I wanted it. – aosmith Jul 28 '15 at 20:57
1

And if you don't want the entire top line bolded, here is an option - say you only wanted the words **"be bold"** to be bolded: `label = "atop(This~should~bold('be bold'),'this should not')"` – Nova Sep 05 '18 at 16:24

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 15 '22 at 08:42

Another possible solution is to employ ggtext package :

library(ggtext)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + 
  geom_point() +
  geom_richtext(aes(x = 4, y = 25, 
                    label = "**This should be bold**<br>and this not",
                    col = "red"),  
                fill = NA,
                label.color = NA) +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 3.2, colour = "red") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Using different font styles in annotate (ggplot2)

3 Answers3

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