I am trying to generate a dotplot that shows changes in virus infection over time in multiple individuals. More than one virus can be detected, and I want each virus to have its own color in the dotplot. Where it gets complicated is when an individual has more than one virus at the same timepoint. I would like to display this data by showing the 2nd virus as a semicircle on top of the first virus present. I have been playing around with this and it looks like adding a 2nd geom_point layer in ggplot2 with a unicode character for a semicircle (e.g. “u25D7”) is one of the easier ways to do this. However, I’m running into two issues.

The answer from this post addresses a spacing issue for ggplots with multi lines and exponents in the second line. Specifically something like this: