Conditional axis.text to change font size and font face creates unwanted margin

[tjebo]

This issue was raised yesterday in this Stackoverflow thread

This happens not only when using ifelse(), but also when manually changing the fonts, e.g. with a named vector.

In my reprex, I used coord_flip, because this was originally shown by the OP in SO, but the same applies without coord_flip (albeit not that obvious), and also with axis.text.x

The weird thing to me is that this indeed seems only to happen with font size and font family.

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(Species, Petal.Length)) + 
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(family = ifelse(levels(iris$Species)=="setosa","sans","mono"))) +
  coord_flip()

This also happens without ifelse

library(tidyverse)

ggplot(iris, aes(Species, Petal.Length)) + 
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(size = c(setosa = 10, virginica = 20, versicolor = 20))) +
  coord_flip()

Adding margin helps, but only with specified units:

ggplot(iris, aes(Species, Petal.Length)) + 
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(family = ifelse(levels(iris$Species)=="setosa","sans","mono"),
                                   margin = margin(r = -2, l = 0.8, unit = 'in'))) +
  coord_flip()

^{Created on 2020-01-16 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[yutannihilation]

Vectorized input to element_text() is not officially supported. Though this is already fixed in the next release, I recommend you not to rely on the current behaviour. See #3492 for more details.

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(Species, Petal.Length)) + 
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(family = ifelse(levels(iris$Species)=="setosa","sans","mono"))) +
  coord_flip()
#> Warning: Vectorized input to `element_text()` is not officially supported.
#> Results may be unexpected or may change in future versions of ggplot2.

^{Created on 2020-01-16 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[peranti]

@yutannihilation How about replacing ifelse(levels(iris$Species)=="setosa","sans","mono") with a named vector? Vector works, but the order of the font choice is to be made on the names.