Remove Border of ggplot2 geom_label Text Annotation in R (Example)

In this R tutorial you’ll learn how to get rid of ggplot2 text annotation borders.

The article contains the following contents:

Here’s how to do it.

Example Data, Packages & Default Plot

Let’s first create some example data in R.

data <- data.frame(x = 7:2,         # Create example data
                   y = 1:6)
data                                # Print example data

Table 1 shows that the example data has six rows and two variables.

We also have to install and load the ggplot2 package, in order to use the corresponding functions:

install.packages("ggplot2")         # Install & load ggplot2
library("ggplot2")

Now, we can draw our data as shown below:

ggp <- ggplot(data, aes(x, y)) +    # ggplot2 plot without text label
  geom_point()
ggp                                 # Draw ggplot2 plot

As shown in Figure 1, the previous R programming code has plotted a ggplot2 scatterplot.

Now, we can add a text label to our plot using the geom_label function:

ggp +                               # Adding text label to plot
  geom_label(aes(x = 4.5,
                 y = 4,
                 label = "This is my text with borders!"))

The output of the previous syntax is visualized in Figure 2 – A ggplot2 scatterplot with text annotation within the plotting area of the plot.

As you can see, our text label has a black border. In the following example I’ll explain how to remove this border from our text box.

Example: Remove Border of ggplot2 Text Label Using label.size

The syntax below demonstrates how to get rid of the border around our geom_label text box.

For this task, we have to specify the label.size to be equal to NA (i.e. Not Available):

ggp +                               # Remove text label border using label.size
  geom_label(aes(x = 4.5,
                 y = 4,
                 label = "This is my text without borders!"),
             label.size = NA)

In Figure 3 you can see that we have managed to create a new graphic that contains a text label without borders with the previous R syntax.

Video & Further Resources

Do you need more information on the R code of this post? Then I recommend watching the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I show the R programming syntax of this tutorial in the R programming language.

In addition, you may want to have a look at some of the related posts of my homepage. You can find some articles about ggplot2 here.

• Left-Align Text in ggplot2 Plot
• Introduction – Create Graphics in R with the ggplot2 Package
• Annotate Text Outside of ggplot2 Plot
• Remove Legend Title from ggplot2 Plot in R
• Remove Vertical or Horizontal Gridlines in ggplot2 Plot
• Graphics in R
• Introduction to R

This post has explained how to avoid the borders in a ggplot2 plot text label annotation in R. Please tell me about it in the comments section, in case you have further questions. Furthermore, please subscribe to my email newsletter to receive updates on new posts.