Missing axis ticks and labels when plotting world map with geom_sf()

Question

When plotting a basic world map I'm not getting the lat and long to show up on the axes. I have done an example provided by the geom_sf() on cran and that does show the lat long.

This is my code below.

library("ggplot2")
library("sf")
#> Linking to GEOS 3.7.2, GDAL 2.4.2, PROJ 5.2.0
library("rnaturalearth")
library("rnaturalearthdata")

world <- ne_countries(scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf")
class(world)
#> [1] "sf"         "data.frame"

ggplot(data = world) +
  geom_sf() +
  coord_sf()

This is the example code which does generate the lat long on the axes.

nc <- st_read(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))
#> Reading layer `nc' from data source `/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library/sf/shape/nc.shp' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
#> Simple feature collection with 100 features and 14 fields
#> geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
#> dimension:      XY
#> bbox:           xmin: -84.32385 ymin: 33.88199 xmax: -75.45698 ymax: 36.58965
#> epsg (SRID):    4267
#> proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=NAD27 +no_defs

ggplot(nc) + geom_sf()

Answer 1

coord_sf() only draws axis ticks when the graticule lines actually reach all the way to the axis. In your map of the world, the plot panel is expanded beyond the size of the earth (you can see that the graticule lines end before the edge of the plot panel), and hence no axis ticks are drawn.

One way to solve the issue is to turn off the expansion.

library("ggplot2")
library("sf")
#> Linking to GEOS 3.7.2, GDAL 2.4.2, PROJ 5.2.0
library("rnaturalearth")
library("rnaturalearthdata")

world <- ne_countries(scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf")
class(world)
#> [1] "sf"         "data.frame"

ggplot(data = world) +
  geom_sf() +
  coord_sf(expand = FALSE)

^{Created on 2019-11-02 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}