Feature Request: Warn when axis title or axis label goes outside of the plot area

[billdenney]

Related to #3281 (but not the same).

When text goes outside of the plot area, usually the plot is less readable. It would help to have a warning when text goes outside of the plot area. In the example below, the x-axis labels appear to start at "b" and end at "I" because the text is cut off. It would help find unreadable figures if this resulted in a warning-- especially with automated reporting (like in knitr documents).

If implemented, a theme option to suppress the warning would be useful, too. It could be something like theme(warn.outside=TRUE), and it may have variants for warn.outside.axis.text, warn.outside.axis.text.x, warn.outside.axis.text.y, warn.outside.axis.title, warn.outside.axis.title.x, warn.outside.axis.title.y, warn.outside.title, warn.outside.subtitle, warn.outside.caption, and warn.outside.legend.

library(ggplot2)

data_with_long_names <-
  data.frame(
    A=c(paste0(rep(LETTERS, 3), collapse=""), paste0(rep(letters, 3), collapse="")),
    B=1
  )

# Feature request: This gives a warning
ggplot(data_with_long_names, aes(x=A, y=B)) +
  geom_point()

Created on 2019-04-30 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).

[smouksassi]

ggrepel would redraw if you resize the figure so this is possible for text that is part of the plot.
For axis labels why it is not possible ?
I would imagine several ways to avoid overlap:
Rotation

Having alternate vertical height ( first tick label go on an imaginary line 1, second tick label imaginary line 2 which is below line1 in a way that we have no overlap ( this was possible in splus back in time) it is like inserting line breaks with control of lineheight

Abbreviate

[thomasp85]

It is certainly possible - also for an extension package. As said in the other issue, some of this is already being considered for ggplot2 proper and others can step up and implement the rest as extension

[paleolimbot]

This is one of the items I'm hoping to make easier as part of the work for #3322, and the ability to extend as per #3329.

[hadley]

Closing as duplicate of #3281. I don't think we need two separate issues for the aspects of the same underlying problem.

[lock]

This old issue has been automatically locked. If you believe you have found a related problem, please file a new issue (with reprex) and link to this issue. https://reprex.tidyverse.org/