I'm working on creating a forest plot in ggplot and want to display multiple aspects of each study on the y-axis. For a clean look, I want each aspect of each study to line up.
I've used stringr to pad space between each study aspect and then pasted all aspects into a single character string to display as the y-axis label, but I lose this alignment when passing to ggplot. I've tried many different padding strategies (filling on the left/right) and tried playing with hjust, but it seems each aspect is being aligned based on the hjust option rather than the entire string or something
require(stringr)
require(tidyverse)
#Create data frame with studies and aspects of different lengths
df <- data.frame(study = c("study 1", "study 2 long name", "study 3", "study 4 superduper long name"),
aspect1 = c("aspect", "longer aspect", "aspect", "long aspect"),
aspect2 = c("superduper long aspect", "aspect", "long aspect", "longer aspect"),
estimate = c(2,3,4,3),
est_lo = c(2,3,4,3) - 1,
est_hi = c(2,3,4,3) + 1)
#Generate labels by padding each aspect and then pasting aspects together
df <- df %>%
mutate(labels = str_c(str_pad(study, 30, "right"),
str_pad(aspect1, 15, "left"),
str_pad(aspect2, 25, "left")))
#Plot with ggplot
df %>%
ggplot(aes(x = estimate, xmin = est_lo, xmax = est_hi, y = labels)) +
geom_point() +
geom_errorbarh(height = 0.2) +
theme(axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
axis.title.y = element_blank(),
axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 1))
I expect the ggplot labels to look just like the labels as character strings:
#look at labels as character strings to check alignment
df$labels
[1] "study 1 aspect superduper long aspect"
[2] "study 2 long name longer aspect aspect"
[3] "study 3 aspect long aspect"
[4] "study 4 superduper long name long aspect longer aspect"
But it appears as though ggplot is doing something unexpected with the white space that eliminates the alignment:
