slopegraph | Edward Tufte 's Slope Graph

I am creating a slope graph but it's being squeezed into one tiny box despite having plenty of SVG space.

Following the normal process, I created a larger canvas that holds all the elements of graph (including labels and axes etc) and then using margins, created a smaller canvas that holds ONLY the graph (no axes but incl some labels).

Then using a linear scale, I added the lines expecting it to take up all the space inside the larger canvas minus the margins.

However, instead the graph is being squeezed into a much smaller box and I cannot tell why. It's causing all the labels to overlap each other. Also, it looks awful because one of the axes is falling exactly where it should, which means it's really far away from graph.

I have tried changing various aspects of the code including expanding the range() of the linear scale but it causes only the smallest change (i.e. the lines expand a little away from each other) which is even more confusing.

I also tried commenting out all the code that moves labels around to prevent them from overlapping in case that was causing the unexpected results. But that wasn't the problem.

Clearly, something else is causing the y values to be confined to a smaller space than is apparent. I did copy this code from somewhere else so maybe I missed something when I modified it for my own use: https://gist.github.com/mwburke/9873c09ac6c21d6ac9153e54892cf5ec

My own code:

I'm working on a chart similar to a slopegraph, where I'd like to put labels along one or both sides with ample blank space to fit them on both sides. In cases where labels are very long, I've wrapped them using stringr::str_wrap to place linebreaks. To keep labels from overlapping, I'm using ggrepel::geom_text_repel with direction = "y" so the x-positions are stable but the y-positions are repelled away from one another. I've also got hjust = "outward" to align the left-side text at its right end and vice versa.

However, it seems that the repel positioning places the label's bounding box with an hjust = "outward", but the text within that label has hjust = 0.5, i.e. text is centered within its bounds. Until now, I'd never noticed this, but with wrapped labels, the second line is awkwardly centered, whereas I'd expect to see both lines left-aligned or right-aligned.

Here's an example built off the mpg dataset.

I am trying to change the order of elements plotted in the slopegraph(below) generated in ggplot My data set is

I want to shrink the plot area so there is more room for ggrepel labels that currently get cut off. I can't seem to offset the labels any more via nudge_x(), and I do not want to shrink the text size.

I'm trying to find a way to compress the chart so that the groups all move closer to the center, leaving more room for labels at the extremes of the x-axis.

Specifically, I am trying to knit this figure into a portrait PDF. I tried controlling fig.width in the chunk options, but this just made the entire chart smaller.

I want to maximize the width on the portrait page, but shrink the plot area relative to the area for labels.

While creating a slopegraph with ggplot2, as below, I find that many of my labels overlap when their data points are close together. How can I change the labelling to automatically stagger my labels if there is overlap?

I'd like to make a slopegraph, along the lines (no pun intended) of this. Ideally, I'd like to do it all in a dplyr-style chain, but I hit a snag when I try to subset the data to add specific geom_text labels. Here's a toy example: