ggplot2labelr
I have a plot where the x-axis is a factor whose labels are long. While probably not an ideal visualization, for now I'd like to simply rotate these labels to be vertical. I've figured this part out with the code below, but as you can see, the labels aren't totally visible.
data(diamonds)
diamonds$cut <- paste("Super Dee-Duper",as.character(diamonds$cut))
q <- qplot(cut,carat,data=diamonds,geom="boxplot")
q + opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=-90))
The function grid.arrange() in the gridExtra package will combine multiple plots; this is how you put two side by side.
require(gridExtra)
plot1 <- qplot(1)
plot2 <- qplot(1)
grid.arrange(plot1, plot2, ncol=2)
This is useful when the two plots are not based on the same data, for example if you want to plot different variables without using reshape().
This will plot the output as a side effect. To print the side effect to a file, specify a device driver (such as pdf, png, etc), e.g.
pdf("foo.pdf")
grid.arrange(plot1, plot2)
dev.off()
or, use arrangeGrob() in combination with ggsave(),
ggsave("foo.pdf", arrangeGrob(plot1, plot2))
This is the equivalent of making two distinct plots using par(mfrow = c(1,2)). This not only saves time arranging data, it is necessary when you want two dissimilar plots.
Facets are helpful for making similar plots for different groups. This is pointed out below in many answers below, but I want to highlight this approach with examples equivalent to the above plots.
mydata <- data.frame(myGroup = c('a', 'b'), myX = c(1,1))
qplot(data = mydata,
x = myX,
facets = ~myGroup)
ggplot(data = mydata) +
geom_bar(aes(myX)) +
facet_wrap(~myGroup)
the plot_grid function in the cowplot is worth checking out as an alternative to grid.arrange. See the answer by @claus-wilke below and this vignette for an equivalent approach; but the function allows finer controls on plot location and size, based on this vignette.
Not sure if this is what you mean, but try setting las=1. Here's an example:
require(grDevices)
tN <- table(Ni <- stats::rpois(100, lambda=5))
r <- barplot(tN, col=rainbow(20), las=1)
That represents the style of axis labels. (0=parallel, 1=all horizontal, 2=all perpendicular to axis, 3=all vertical)
Best Answer
Change the last line to
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:
The image above is from this blog post.