R - Plot Only Text

Read up on ?par . There is limited capability to select the font type via the family and font arguments.

You can do this using base graphics. First you'll want to take away all of the margins from the plot window:

par(mar = c(0,0,0,0))

And then you'll plot an empty plot:

plot(c(0, 1), c(0, 1), ann = F, bty = 'n', type = 'n', xaxt = 'n', yaxt = 'n')

Here's a guide to what's going on here (use ?plot.default and ?par for more details):

• ann - Display Annotoations (set to FALSE)
• bty - Border Type (none)
• type - Plot Type (one that produces no points or lines)
• xaxt - x axis type (none)
• yaxt - y axis type (none)

Now to plot the text. I took out the extra spaces because they didn't seem to be necessary.

text(x = 0.5, y = 0.5, paste("The following is text that'll appear in a plot window.\n",
                             "As you can see, it's in the plot window\n",
                             "One might imagine useful informaiton here"), 
     cex = 1.6, col = "black")

Now to restore the default settings

par(mar = c(5, 4, 4, 2) + 0.1)

I hope that helps!

Here's a handy example to play with too:

par(mar = c(0,0,0,0))
plot(c(0, 1), c(0, 1), ann = F, bty = 'n', type = 'n', xaxt = 'n', yaxt = 'n')

text(x = 0.34, y = 0.9, paste("This is a plot without a plot."), 
     cex = 1.5, col = "black", family="serif", font=2, adj=0.5)

text(x = 0.34, y = 0.6, paste("    Perhpas you'll:"), 
     cex = 1.2, col = "gray30", family="sans", font=1, adj=1)
text(x = 0.35, y = 0.6, paste("Find it helpful"), 
     cex = 1.2, col = "black", family="mono", font=3, adj=0)

You could use annotate in ggplot2 like

library(ggplot2)
text = paste("\n   The following is text that'll appear in a plot window.\n",
         "       As you can see, it's in the plot window\n",
         "       One might imagine useful information here")
ggplot() + 
  annotate("text", x = 4, y = 25, size=8, label = text) + 
  theme_void()

And you can of course remove the plot margins, axes, etc. to have just the text