Until now I was using plot() and I check the possibility to shift to ggplot2. All is OK until now except to write text out of the plotting region [equivalent of par(xpd=TRUE); text(x, y, labels)]. I have found using google recommendation to use annotation_custom() but I still failed to print text out of the plotting region: library("ggplot2") df <- data.frame(x = 1:10, y = 1:10) ggplot(data=df, mapping=aes(x, y))+ geom_line(color="black") + annotation_custom( grob = textGrob(label="essai"), xmin=2.5, xmax=5, ymin=10, ymax=11 ) + theme(plot.margin = unit(c(1.5, 1, 0.5, 0.5), "cm")) If someone has the solution, I could continue to explore ggplot2 ! Thanks a lot, Marc