How do I neatly align my stacked barchart labels?

December 19, 2021

I have my labels roughly aligned to each side of my stacked bar chart. The problem is that they look like a mess because they aren’t right and left justified on either side of the bar. How do I fix this so that they look professional?

df3 <- data.frame(
  Label = c("Dasher", "Dancer", "Comet", "Cupid", "Prancer", "Blitzen", "Rudolph"),
  Amount = c(650.01, 601.01, 340.05, 330.20, 260.01, 250.80, 10.10)
)

# Sort order
level_order <- df3 %>% 
  arrange(desc(Amount))

ggplot(level_order, aes(fill=fct_inorder(Label), y=Amount, x="")) + 
               geom_bar(position="stack", stat="identity", width = 0.55) +
               scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Blues", direction = -1) +
               theme_void() +
               geom_text(aes(label = paste0("$", Amount)),
                         position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),
                         hjust = -3.1,
                         size = 5) +
               geom_text(aes(label = Label),
                         position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),
                         hjust = 5,
                         size = 5) +
               theme(legend.position = "none") +
               theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 50, hjust = .5, vjust = 0)) +
               ggtitle("Food Costs by Reindeer")

>Solution :

Try fixing the x co-ordinate in the call to geom_text and managing alignment with hjust…

df3 <- data.frame(
  Label = c("Dasher", "Dancer", "Comet", "Cupid", "Prancer", "Blitzen", "Rudolph"),
  Amount = c(650.01, 601.01, 340.05, 330.20, 260.01, 250.80, 10.10)
)


library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(forcats)

level_order <- df3 %>% 
  arrange(desc(Amount))

ggplot(level_order, aes(fill=fct_inorder(Label), y=Amount, x="")) + 
  geom_bar(position="stack", stat="identity", width = 0.55) +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Blues", direction = -1) +
  theme_void() +
  geom_text(aes(x = 1.3, label = paste0("$", Amount)),
            position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),
            hjust = 0,
            size = 5) +
  geom_text(aes(x = 0.6, label = Label),
            position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),
            hjust = 0,
            size = 5) +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 50, hjust = .5, vjust = 0)) +
  ggtitle("Food Costs by Reindeer")