ggtext and parsing html with latest version of ggplot

[Philip-Leftwich]

I found a problem with ggplot and rendering html text with ggtext or marquee

I expected to parse character string in html format and have the style implemented.
This works for my code in ggplot 3.5.2 but not in ggplot 4.0.0

Here is the code to reproduce the bug:

library(ggplot2)
library(ggtext)

# Minimal dataframe
df <- data.frame(
  gRNA_type = rep(c("cd<sup><i>g338-384</i></sup>", 
                    "wt<sup><i>control</i></sup>"), each = 5),
  win = c(95, 88, 92, 90, 94, 45, 50, 48, 52, 47),
  loss = c(5, 12, 8, 10, 6, 55, 50, 52, 48, 53),
  id = 1:10
)

# Test plot
ggplot(df, aes(x = gRNA_type, y = win)) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_markdown())

^{Created on 2025-11-19 with reprex v2.1.1}

[teunbrand]

Thanks, I can confirm this on my end. The issue is element inheritance between S3 and S7 elements. element_markdown() isn't propagated to axis.text.x.bottom because theme_minimal()$axis.text.x.bottom already exists. The issue can be fixed by using theme(axis.text.x.bottom = element_markdown()).