Take a string and return a nicely formatted quote

This morning I’ve been building an #rstats function to take a string and return a nicely formatted quote, using a client’s brand guidelines. It’s been a fun adventure involving fonts, hacking geom_textbox() and allowing for different string lengths.

Author

Affiliation

Cara Thompson

Building Stories with Data

Published

November 10, 2022

Here’s where I’ve landed.

Image of text with a line above it which is interrupted by quote marks, and a line below it.

To get there, the first step was to register the “solid” variant of Font Awesome, because that’s where the left-quote icon lives. This had been the missing piece of the puzzle in many previous failed attempts to get Font Awesome !

# Step 1: Register the "solid" variant of FA
systemfonts::register_variant(
  "Font Awesome Solid",
  family = "Font Awesome 6 Free",
  weight = "heavy"
)

# Step 2: Use it within the plot
ggplot(NULL, aes(0, 0)) +
  geom_text(
    aes(label = "quote-left"),
    colour = "purple",
    size = 80,
    family = "Font Awesome Solid"
  )

# Step 3: Do mini victory dance

Output of the code in previous image: a ggplot showing two purple quote marks

Then I needed to figure out how to get the textbox sides to disappear. Here’s the quote from the first image with all the box outlines showing. The key: feed it the same text, but make that text colour NA so that the box is the same height and adjust the padding and vjust/valign.

Dark teal background with a bold red rectangle containing a smaller green square featuring quotation marks. Central text reads 'It works!' in light blue and black. Two thin yellow lines divide the rectangle into three sections.

The beauty of using the outlines of the geom_textbox() rather than say adding a geom_hline() is that the line moves to fit the text.

Although I still needed to figure out a way of not letting the box get bigger than the exported plotting area…

Minimalist design image featuring a large dark green background. Centred text reads 'It works!' in teal with quotation marks above. Thin yellow horizontal lines frame the text. Clean layout emphasises simplicity and focus.

The text size is set by a text_size variable within the function, which is dependent on the number of characters in the quote. So far it seems to be working… Next step, try it out with the client’s real quotes and see what breaks!

Quote design on a dark teal background with text: 'It works! Even with a few line breaks, it still works! See!' Features yellow horizontal lines and oversized quotation marks for emphasis.

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CC BY 4.0

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Thompson, Cara. 2022. “Take a String and Return a Nicely Formatted Quote.” November 10, 2022. https://www.cararthompson.com/posts/2022-11-10-this-morning-ive-been-building/.