Avoid overlapping geom_point and geom_text in ggplot2

Question

How can I avoid that these 2 layers in ggplot2 overlap? I try to display the text so that they are not laying above the points.

check_overlap does a great job with avoiding that the text overlaps itself, but not with other layers.

I also tried the library geom_text_repel, but this library does not support check_overlap and shows the text for every data point.

But I need to not have the text for every point, like check_overlap does.

ggplot(dat, aes(x = CPI, y = HDI)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = Region), shape=21, size=4, position = "identity") +
  geom_text(data = dat, aes(label = Country), size=4, check_overlap = TRUE)

[`ggrepel`](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggrepel/index.html) — hrbrmstr, Oct 04 '17 at 01:00
Can you remove the repeated labels at each data point, & then use `geom_text_repel` from ggrepel? — Z.Lin, Oct 04 '17 at 02:12
i have tried `geom_text_repel` but it shows a label or text for every datapoint in the `geom_point`, what i dont want. — Max, Oct 04 '17 at 02:29

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 04 '17 at 16:30

2

geom_text_repel will not create text labels for the empty string "". However, the text labels will repel away from the unlabeled data points.

Try this:

# Hide text labels for the first 3 data points
idx <- c(1,2,3)

dat$CountryLabel      <- dat$Country
dat$CountryLabel[idx] <- ""

library(ggrepel)
ggplot(...) + geom_text_repel(data = dat, aes(label = CountryLabel))

edited Oct 04 '17 at 16:30

missuse

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answered Oct 04 '17 at 14:25

Kamil Slowikowski

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This is not a general solution to the problem. We want to avoid the overlap between geom_text and geom_point. – Herman Toothrot Jun 10 '21 at 11:21

Avoid overlapping geom_point and geom_text in ggplot2

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