Multicolored title with R

Question

I'd like to add colors to certain words in titles to my graphs. I've been able to find some precedent here. Specifically, I'd like the text that's wrapped in apostrophes (in the output, below) to correspond to the color of their respective bar charts.

Here's how far I've gotten with titles in R before having to export a PDF to Adobe Illustrator or other program.

name <- c("Peter", "Gabriel", "Rachel", "Bradley")
age <- c(34, 13, 28, 0.9)
fake_graph <- family[order(family$age, decreasing = F), ]
fake_graph <- within(fake_graph, {
    bar_color = ifelse(fake_graph$name == "Rachel", "blue", "gray")
})

# Plot creation
library(ggplot2)
fake_bar_charts <- ggplot() +
  geom_bar(
    data = fake_graph,
    position = "identity",
    stat = "identity",
    width = 0.75,
    fill = fake_graph$bar_color,
    aes(x = name, y = age)
    ) +
  scale_x_discrete(limits = fake_graph$name) +
  scale_y_continuous(expand = c(0, 0)) +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_minimal()
family <- data.frame(name, age)

# Add title
library(grid)
library(gridExtra)
grid_title <- textGrob(
  label = "I spend more time with 'Rachel' than\nwith 'other family members.'",
  x = unit(0.2, "lines"),
  y = unit(0.1, "lines"),
  hjust = 0, vjust = 0,
  gp = gpar(fontsize = 14, fontface = "bold")
)
gg <- arrangeGrob(fake_bar_charts, top = grid_title)
grid.arrange(gg)

Output:

This example uses ggplot2 to create bar charts as well as grid and gridExtra for the title functionality, but I'd be willing to work with any solution (preferably with ggplot2 to create the graph itself) that could provide me with the text in quotes to match their respective bar chart colors.

Any other solutions on this site haven't been able to solve this puzzle, but I would love to find a solution for this from within R.

Thank you for any help!

Answer 1

I wrote the label with too honest way. First grob's width decides second grob's x, and so on. I used grobTree() to group them. Because gTree doesn't have own size information, I gave arrangeGrob() an argument padding to keep gTree's space.

library(grid); library(gridExtra); library(ggplot2)

df <- data.frame(name = c("Rachel", "Peter", "Gabriel","Bradley"), age = c(23, 35, 12, 3))
fake_bar_charts <- ggplot(df, aes(x=name, y=age)) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill = c(rep("gray50",3), "red")) + coord_flip()

grobs <- grobTree(
  gp = gpar(fontsize = 14, fontface = "bold"), 
  textGrob(label = "I spend more time with '", name = "title1",
           x = unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(1.4, "lines"), 
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0),
  textGrob(label = "Rachel", name = "title2",
           x = grobWidth("title1") + unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(1.4, "lines"),
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0, gp = gpar(col = "red")),
  textGrob(label = "' than", name = "title3",
           x = grobWidth("title1") + grobWidth("title2") + unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(1.4, "lines"),
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0),
  textGrob(label = "with '", name = "title4",
           x = unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(0.1, "lines"),
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0),
  textGrob(label = "other family members", name = "title5",
           x = grobWidth("title4") + unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(0.1, "lines"),
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0, gp = gpar(col = "gray50")),
  textGrob(label = "'.", name = "title6",
           x = grobWidth("title4") + grobWidth("title5") + unit(0.2, "lines"), y = unit(0.1, "lines"),
           hjust = 0, vjust = 0)
)

gg <- arrangeGrob(fake_bar_charts, top=grobs, padding = unit(2.6, "line"))
grid.newpage()
grid.draw(gg)

Answer 2

A very easy way is to use ggtext

Which is achieved with

library(ggtext) #remotes::install_github("wilkelab/ggtext")

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, color = Species)) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_color_manual(
    name = NULL,
    values = c(setosa = "#0072B2", virginica = "#009E73", versicolor = "#D55E00"),
    labels = c(
      setosa = "<i style='color:#0072B2'>I. setosa</i>",
      virginica = "<i style='color:#009E73'>I. virginica</i>",
      versicolor = "<i style='color:#D55E00'>I. versicolor</i>")
  ) +
  labs(
    title = "**Fisher's *Iris* dataset**  
    <span style='font-size:11pt'>Sepal width vs. sepal length for 
    <span style='color:#0072B2;'>setosa</span>, 
    <span style='color:#D55E00;'>versicolor</span>, and
    <span style='color:#009E73;'>virginica</span>
    </span>",
    x = "Sepal length (cm)", y = "Sepal width (cm)"
  ) +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(
    plot.title = element_markdown(lineheight = 1.1),
    legend.text = element_markdown(size = 11)
  )