Manual textsmoothing?

[johnhenrypezzuto]

Hi all,

Thanks for the fantastic package. I'm not sure if this is planning on being implemented but I think some kind of scale_textsmooth_manual or a vector of textsmooth inputs would be useful idea to keep in mind. It's been an issue that has been coming up for me while I've been using the package. Thank you so much!

[AllanCameron]

Hi John. Thanks for adding this issue. At the moment text smoothing is a single - valued parameter and not an aesthetic. I don't think it makes sense to have it as an aesthetic mapping, but vectorised input might be possible. We had not considered this - are you able to provide a motivating example to show where this might be helpful? It would probably require quite a lot of development to allow per-string smoothing, so it would be good to see where it might be useful.

[teunbrand]

I agree with Alan here that an evident benefit would be very nice to see. I personally see the text smoothing as a last resort: something you'd use when there are no other methods available anymore. Two scenarios in which that can happen if when you're using a stat that still returns a noisy path, in which case you cannot use geom_(text)smooth() or when you're using geom_textsf() and it is simply harder to tweak the underlying data. In a worst case scenario, you could still split up the data per path and add individual layers, each with their own text smoothing.

[AllanCameron]

I agree Teun - there will always be work-arounds. It might be that there are frequent use cases where it makes sense, but I can't think of them. I'm quite fond of using the text-smoothing rather than seeing it as a last resort - I think many of the community examples I see would benefit from a little bit of text smoothing, but in any case I would definitely want to see a motivating example here.

[AllanCameron]

This has been open a while, and no motivating example appears to be forthcoming. Happy to reconsider it later if someone wants to show us where it would be useful.