Not sure text should be a separate geometry

[gigamonkey]

Especially if we're going to have text be something that displays on hover, it seems like it should be somehow tied to the other geometries. That is, if I have a graphic displayed with Interval geometry, I'd like to be able to have hovering anywhere over the bars cause a text label to appear. I'm not sure the best way to do this but it seems like it'd be handy.

It may be that we also want a Text geometry for displaying text as the primary thing--if you want to display words rather than dots in a scatter plot. Or maybe that's a scale--you use a PointGeometry but instead of a color or shape scale you use a text scale. Worth thinking about. What does ggplot do?

[gigamonkey]

Oh, just noticed there is a TextScale. Clearly I need to look at what we've got as part of thinking about this.

[asolove]

Yeah, I completely agree, text options should be aesthetics available and implemented separately by each geometry. I'm curious what kinds of options would be helpful. Here is my wish list:

• The TextScale currently implements a simple way to interpolate numerical values into the label text. That should be built out with more options for, e.g. truncating floats, things other than numbers, conditionals, etc.
• Each geometry should probably have options for things like highlighting or adding a border to itself during hover.
• A standard way to style the labels of highlights across different graphic types, whether as gg options or via documented css hooks.

[gigamonkey]

Regarding your third point, my instinct is to see how far we can push CSS styling. Ideally I'd like to document some rational set of classes that all the SVG elements we produce are classified with and such that most (all?) graphical changes you could desire would be achievable via CSS.

[gigamonkey]

And to your second point, a similar idea might work: if we actually draw some extra elements (e.g. borders) that are by default invisible, then those can also be dynamically styled via CSS in the appropriate event handlers.