How to center ggplot plot title

Question

The "lege artis" way to center justify a plot title in ggplot - plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5) - centers the title over plot area excluding axis labels.

This can get ugly when the axis labels are very long, such as this plot of songs in Mary Poppins Soundtrack vs. their character length.

library(tidyverse)

mary_poppins <- data_frame(song = c("Overture", "Sister Suffragette", "The Life I Lead", "The Perfect Nanny", "A Spoonful of Sugar", "Pavement Artist", "Jolly Holiday", "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", "Stay Awake", "I Love to Laugh", "A British Bank", "Feed the Birds ", "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", "Chim Chim Cher-ee", "Step in Time", "A Man Has Dreams", "Let's Go Fly a Kite"
))

mary_poppins <- mary_poppins %>%
  mutate(len = nchar(song))

ggplot(data = mary_poppins, aes(x = reorder(song, len), y = len)) +
  geom_col(fill = "firebrick") +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_light() +
  theme(axis.title.y = element_blank(),
        axis.text = element_text(size = rel(1.5)),
        plot.title = element_text(size = rel(2.5), face = "bold", hjust = 0.5, 
                                  margin = margin(t = 10, b = 20, unit = "pt"))) +
  ggtitle("Mary Poppins") +
  ylab("Lenght of title (characters)")

Is there a way to center the title over the total plot area, i.e . including the area taken over by axis labels?

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 13 '20 at 03:20

A simple way to solve the problem is to add the following to the plot:

theme(plot.title.position = 'plot', 
      plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5))

The first part tells ggplot to use the entire plot as a reference for the centering, and the second part centers the title.

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 12 '18 at 14:56

5

Short solution I've found:

theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = -0.2))

hjust parameter controls distance from the left alignment to the y axis. Negative values move text to the left

answered Sep 12 '18 at 14:56

Angel Lopez Sanz

111
2
1

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 18 '17 at 19:52

3

Solution adding white space to centre title:

Add spaces after the title with:

ggtitle(paste0("Mary Poppins", paste0(rep("", 30), collapse = " ")))

For the output like this:

Not perfect solution, but works.

answered Sep 18 '17 at 19:52

pogibas

27,303
19
84
117

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 18 '17 at 20:16

Alternately, you can use gridExtra::grid.arrange and grid::textGrob to create the title without needing to pad it visually. This basically creates a separate plot object with your title and glues it on top, independing of the contents of your ggplot call.

First store your whole ggplot call in a variable, e.g. p1:

grid.arrange(textGrob("Mary Poppins", 
               gp = gpar(fontsize = 2.5*11, fontface = "bold")), 
             p1, 
             heights = c(0.1, 1))

You have to translate your theme() settings to gpar(). The base size of theme_light is 11, which is where the 2.5*11 comes from (and the 2.5 from your rel(2.5)).

The advantage here is that you know your title will be truly centered, not just close enough by eye.

thank you - this is indeed a neater solution than padding spaces! — Jindra Lacko, Sep 18 '17 at 20:20

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 13:54

As I replied in an essentially duplicate question, you can use the patchwork library and it's plot_annotation, so you'll have:

library(tidyverse)

mary_poppins <- data_frame(song = c("Overture", "Sister Suffragette", "The Life I Lead", "The Perfect Nanny", "A Spoonful of Sugar", "Pavement Artist", "Jolly Holiday", "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", "Stay Awake", "I Love to Laugh", "A British Bank", "Feed the Birds ", "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", "Chim Chim Cher-ee", "Step in Time", "A Man Has Dreams", "Let's Go Fly a Kite"
))
mary_poppins <- mary_poppins %>%
  mutate(len = nchar(song))

ggplot(data = mary_poppins, aes(x = reorder(song, len), y = len)) +
  geom_col(fill = "firebrick") +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_light() +
  theme(axis.title.y = element_blank(),
        axis.text = element_text(size = rel(1.5))) +
  patchwork::plot_annotation("Mary Poppins", 
        theme = theme(plot.title = element_text(size = rel(2.5), face = "bold", hjust = 0.5, 
                                  margin = margin(t = 10, b = 20, unit = "pt")))) +
  ylab("Lenght of title (characters)")

Since plot_annotation is designed for multipanel plots, it will not inherit the theme of the plot you are constructing, so you need to give it separately. It will however honor any global theme.

The resulting plot is (hopefully) what you need.

no a typical {patchwork} use case, but it does work - thanks for sharing! — Jindra Lacko, Feb 29 '20 at 19:57

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered May 19 '18 at 08:20

1

If you're in a hurry, adding spaces after title in ggtitle will also work...

ggtitle("Mary Poppins                                 ") +

Output:

answered May 19 '18 at 08:20

Dan Tarr

209
3
8

How to center ggplot plot title

6 Answers6

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