Adding space *just* on right size of x-axis, color based on relative position, specify labels

Question

I have a time series graph of 49 countries, and I'd like to do three things: (1) prevent the country label name from being cut off, (2) specify so that the coloring is based on the position in the graph rather than alphabetically, and (3) specify which countries I would like to label (49 labels in one graph is too many).

library(ggplot2)
library(directlabels)
library(zoo)
library(RColorBrewer)
library(viridis)

colourCount = length(unique(df$newCol))
getPalette = colorRampPalette(brewer.pal(11, "Paired"))

## Yearly Incorporation Rates
ggplot(df,aes(x=year2, y=total_count_th, group = newCol, color = newCol)) +
  geom_line() + 
  geom_dl(aes(label = newCol), 
          method= list(dl.trans(x = x + 0.1), 
          "last.points", cex = 0.8)) +
          scale_color_manual(values = getPalette(colourCount)) + 
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust=1),
          legend.position = "none") +
  labs(title = "Title",
           x = "Year",
           y = "Count") 

This code works -- there are 49 lines, and each of them is labelled. But it just so happens that all the countries with the highest y-values have the same/similar colors (red/orange). So is there a way to specify the colors dynamically (maybe with scale_color_identity)? And how do I add space just on the right side of the labels? I found the expand = expand_scale, but it added space on both sides (though I did read that in the new version, it should be possible to do so.)

I am also fine defining a list of 49 manually-defined colors rather than using the color ramp.

Answer 1

One way to do it is to limit the x axis by adding something like

coord_cartesian(xlim = c(1,44), expand = TRUE)

In this case, I had 41 years of observations on the axis, so by specifying 44, I added space to the x-axis. Thank you to @JonSpring for the help and getting me to the right answer!