How to prevent labels from overlapping in R with ggplot2 and ggrepel packages (CC150)

September 30, 2021 • PD Schloss • 1 min read • •

A challenge of adding labels to a plot is how to prevent the labels from overlapping with each other. Thankfully, the ggrepel R package can be used with the ggplot2 package to produce an attractive figure without much trouble. The data depict the percentage of people in 15 countries who would be willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as of August and October of 2020.

Pat uses the geom_label_repel and geom_text_repel functions from ggrepel and the geom_label function function from ggplot2 and a variety of functions from the dplyr, showtext, and ggtext packages in RStudio.

Code

You can browse the state of the repository at the

• beginning of the episode
• end of the episode

Data

The august_october_2020.csv data is available in the GitHub repository.

X.1,Total Agree - August 2020,Total Agree - October 2020
Total,77,73
India,87,87
China,97,85
South Korea,84,83
Brazil,88,81
Australia,88,79
United Kingdom,85,79
Mexico,75,78
Canada,76,76
Germany,67,69
Japan,75,69
South Africa,64,68
Italy,67,65
Spain,72,64
United States,67,64
France,59,54