label end of lines outside of plot area - r

Question

I am trying to replicate this figure from the Financial Times.
Here is a gist with the data. I'm struggling to label the end of the lines because I run out of room in the plot. I found a few ways to expand the limits of the plot area, but this is not ideal because the gridlines extend as well.
library(tidyverse)
library(ggrepel)
covid %>%
ggplot(aes(x = date, y = deaths_roll7_100k, color = Province_State)) +
geom_line() +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 2.4, .2)) +
scale_x_date(breaks = seq.Date(from=as.Date('2020-09-01'),
to=as.Date('2021-07-12'),
by="month"),
labels = function(x) if_else(month(x) == 9 | month(x) == 1,
paste(month(x, label = TRUE),
"\n", year(x)),
paste(month(x, label = TRUE))),
limits = as.Date(c("2020-09-01", "2021-11-01"))) +
geom_text_repel(aes(label = label),
segment.alpha = 0,
hjust = 0,
direction="y",
na.rm = TRUE,
xlim = as.Date(c("2021-08-01", "2021-11-01")))

Answer 1

An alternative to ggrepel is to use geom_text and turn "clipping" off (similar to this question/answer), e.g.
covid %>%
ggplot(aes(x = date, y = deaths_roll7_100k, color = Province_State)) +
geom_line() +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 2.4, .2)) +
scale_x_date(breaks = seq.Date(from=as.Date('2020-09-01'),
to=as.Date('2021-07-12'),
by="month"),
date_labels = "%b\n%Y",
limits = as.Date(c("2020-09-01", "2021-07-01"))) +
geom_text(data = . %>% filter(date == max(date)),
aes(color = Province_State, x = as.Date(Inf),
y = deaths_roll7_100k),
hjust = 0, size = 4, vjust = 0.7,
label = c("Arizona\n", "North Carolina")) +
coord_cartesian(expand = FALSE, clip = "off")
--
With some more tweaks and the Financial-Times/ftplottools R theme you can get the plot looking pretty similar to the Financial Times figure, e.g.
library(tidyverse)
#remotes::install_github("Financial-Times/ftplottools")
library(ftplottools)
library(extrafont)
#font_import()
#fonts()
covid %>%
ggplot() +
geom_line(aes(x = date, y = deaths_roll7_100k,
group = Province_State, color = Province_State)) +
geom_text(data = . %>% filter(date == max(date)),
aes(color = Province_State, x = as.Date(Inf),
y = deaths_roll7_100k),
hjust = 0, size = 4, vjust = 0.7,
label = c("Arizona\n", "North Carolina")) +
coord_cartesian(expand = FALSE, clip = "off") +
ft_theme(base_family = "Arimo for Powerline") +
theme(plot.margin = unit(c(1,6,1,1), "lines"),
legend.position = "none",
plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFF1E6"),
axis.title = element_blank(),
panel.grid.major.x = element_line(colour = "gray75"),
plot.caption = element_text(size = 8, color = "gray50")) +
scale_color_manual(values = c("#E85D8C", "#0D5696")) +
scale_x_date(breaks = seq.Date(from = as.Date('2020-09-01'),
to = as.Date('2021-07-01'),
by = "1 month"),
limits = as.Date(c("2020-09-01", "2021-07-01")),
date_labels = "%b\n%Y") +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(from = 0, to = 2.4, by = 0.2)) +
labs(title = "New deaths attributed to Covid-19 in North Carolina and Arizona",
subtitle = "Seven-day rolling average of new deaths (per 100k)\n",
caption = "Source: Analysis of data from John Hopkins SSE\nUpdated: 12th July 2021 | CCBY4.0")