Back in 2010 I posted some R code for circle packing . Now, just five years later, I've ported the code to Rcpp and created a little package which you can find at GitHub . The main function is circleLayout which takes a set of overlapping circles and tries to find a non-overlapping arrangement for them. Here's an example: And here's the code: # Create some random circles, positioned within the central portion # of a bounding square, with smaller circles being more common than # larger ones. ncircles