Hi there. I love your package and have been using it for years. I'd like to use it for a non-traditional application though.

I don't have a reprex, but have attached a simple pdf that is illustrative of my request. My job often requires me to make "table maps" (aka. chembox or callout table maps) that are ugly but, unfortunately, are also a regulatory requirement. We essentially build small tables from data associated with a given location and then try to squeeze these "table labels" into the blank spaces between the locations. I've developed R code that builds them as sf objects and then exports them shapefiles for use in GIS so that I can at least apply conditional formatting (e.g heatmap) to make them slightly more useful and less ugly.

My code makes an attempt to "spread" the tables by pushing them toward the centroids of a Thiessen/Voronoi tesselation of the points. However, I'd like to upgrade my code to use a ggrepel-like approach. My initial thought was to simply build a placeholder "stacked label" (as in the attached pdf) and pump it through ggplot with geom_label_repel. The various pages in this pdf show the results using different values for the force argument. This approach would require me to somehow extract the ggrepel anchor points for the labels and attach those to my input dataframe for moving the sf objects. I'm assuming this can be done but have not looked into exactly how at this point.

My main question/feature request is whether ggrepel has an argument (or would consider adding one) for preventing both: a) leader line crossings, and b) overlaps between the leader lines and the labels. With shorter labels, I'm assuming the label box rarely overlaps its own (or other) leader lines. This is a common phenomenon with "table labels" though. In the example attached, all the tables are the same size, but that's not always the case. I've been thinking on different strategies for identifying placement voids by size and prioritizing placement of larger tables first, but I'd like to see if ggrepel can solve my problem faster/easier first.

As an alternative to making these stacked labels as placeholders for my actual sf objects, I was wondering if there's a way to simply specify the dimensions (height and width) of the labels to be placed using fields that aggregate the data for a given location into box sizes (both in page inches and real-world dimensions based on the reference scale of the map).

ggrepeltest.pdf