in ggplot2 can i set the upper limit to automaticly pick the major gridline above my maximum datapoint (faceted)

Question

In ggplot2, I want to create a grid faceted graph with a free x scale like in the first image. But I want my limits to be at the edge of the plot and for my upper limit to automatically be 1 tick higher than my maximum data point for each faceted graph

Is there any simple way to do this? its just a formating prefernce I know it should involve the limet and expand functions.

p.s My real data does need faceting unlike the gapminder example

library(gapminder)
gap_filterd<-gapminder%>%
  mutate(country=as.character(country))%>%
  filter(startsWith(country,"D"))%>%
  mutate(country=as.factor(country))

gap_filterd%>%
  ggplot(aes(pop,lifeExp))+
  geom_point()+
  facet_grid(rows = vars(country),
             cols = vars(continent),
             scales = "free_x"
  )+
  scale_x_continuous(
    labels = label_number(scale_cut = cut_short_scale()),
    limits = c(0,NA),
    expand = c(0,NA))

Answer 1

One possible option would be to set the limits= using scales::breaks_extended and argument only.loose=TRUE which will set the limits such that

the extreme labels will be outside the data range. (See ?labeling::extended)

However, this is perhaps still not perfect as you can see in the middle left panel.

Note: I added clip=off to prevent clipping and increased the panel spacing to avoid overlapping axis text at the panel borders.

library(gapminder)
library(ggh4x)
library(tidyverse)
library(scales)

gap_filterd %>%
  ggplot(aes(pop, lifeExp)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_grid(
    rows = vars(country),
    cols = vars(continent),
    scales = "free_x"
  ) +
  scale_x_continuous(
    labels = label_number(scale_cut = cut_short_scale()),
    limits = \(x) range(
      scales::breaks_extended(only.loose = TRUE)(c(0, x))
    ),
    expand = c(0, NA)
  ) +
  coord_cartesian(clip = "off") +
  theme(
    panel.spacing.x = unit(20, "pt")
  )