R – Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

ggplot2r

I am plotting a graph with a categorical variable on the x axis and a numerical variable on the y axis.

For the x axis, given that there are many data points, the default text formatting causes the label for each tick mark to overlap with other labels. How do I (a) change the font size for my axis text and (b) change the orientation of the text so that the text is perpendicular to the axis?

Best Answer

Use theme():

d <- data.frame(x=gl(10, 1, 10, labels=paste("long text label ", letters[1:10])), y=rnorm(10))
ggplot(d, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() +
    theme(text = element_text(size=20),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1)) 
#vjust adjust the vertical justification of the labels, which is often useful

enter image description here

There's lots of good information about how to format your ggplots here. You can see a full list of parameters you can modify (basically, all of them) using ?theme.

Related Solutions

Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

Change the last line to

q + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust=1))

By default, the axes are aligned at the center of the text, even when rotated. When you rotate +/- 90 degrees, you usually want it to be aligned at the edge instead:

alt text

The image above is from this blog post.

R – How to set limits for axes in ggplot2 R plots

Basically you have two options

scale_x_continuous(limits = c(-5000, 5000))

coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-5000, 5000))

Where the first removes all data points outside the given range and the second only adjusts the visible area. In most cases you would not see the difference, but if you fit anything to the data it would probably change the fitted values.

You can also use the shorthand function xlim (or ylim), which like the first option removes data points outside of the given range:

+ xlim(-5000, 5000)

For more information check the description of coord_cartesian.

The RStudio cheatsheet for ggplot2 makes this quite clear visually. Here is a small section of that cheatsheet:

Distributed under CC BY.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

R – How to set limits for axes in ggplot2 R plots

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