How to adjust area text bounding box without altering kerning or spacing between words?

Question

I am creating svg figures using ggplot in R, then fine-tuning them in Adobe Illustrator.

Any attempt to expand area text in Illustrator (i.e. plot title or axis labels) causes the words to be spaced further apart.

How can I keep the word spacing constant while increasing the size of the area text bounding box, so that all the text can be seen?

The images show what happens when I try to expand the text box.

Answer 1

This turns out to be a problem with the bounding boxes drawn by the graphics device in R Studio. It cannot be undone by Illustrator.

The simplest (though non-reproducible) solution is just to delete the text box in Illustrator and add a new one manually, then type your text. It is fast and if you insist on reproducible work it is necessary to learn the ins and outs of the theme arguments in ggplot to specify the sizes. I also recommend the latex2expr package for typing LaTeX math notation into ggplot arguments.