Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

Question

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

User · Answer

Ditto  Drew Steen on the use of theme    Here are common theme attributes for axis text and titles   ggplot mtcars  aes x   factor cyl   y   mpg      geom point      theme axis text x   element text color    grey20   size   20  angle   90  hjust    5  vjust    5  face    plain            axis text y   element text color    grey20   size   12  angle   0  hjust   1  vjust   0  face    plain              axis title x   element text color    grey20   size   12  angle   0  hjust    5  vjust   0  face    plain            axis title y   element text color    grey20   size   12  angle   90  hjust    5  vjust    5  face    plain

User · Answer

Use theme     d  lt - 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

User · Answer

Using  fill  attribute helps in cases like this  You can remove the text from axis using element blank  and show multi color bar chart with a legend  I am plotting a part removal frequency in a repair shop as below  ggplot data df subset aes x Part y Removal Frequency fill Part   geom bar stat  identity   theme axis text x    element blank      I went for this solution in my case as I had many bars in bar chart and I was not able to find a suitable font size which is both readable and also small enough not to overlap each other

User · Answer

Adding to previous solutions  you can also specify the font size relative to the base size included in themes such as theme bw    where base size is 11  using the rel   function   For example   ggplot mtcars  aes disp  mpg       geom point       theme bw       theme axis text x element text size rel 0 5   angle 90

User · Answer

Use theme     d  lt - 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     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

User · Answer

When making many plots  it makes sense to set it globally  relevant part is the second line  three lines together are a working example       library  ggplot2      theme update text   element text size 20      ggplot mpg  aes displ  hwy  colour   class     geom point

User · Answer

Another way to deal with overlapping labels is using guide   guide axis n dodge   2     library dplyr  library tibble  library ggplot2   dt  lt - mtcars   gt   rownames to column  name     gt      dplyr  filter cyl    4     Overlapping labels ggplot dt  aes x   name  y   mpg     geom point       ggplot dt  aes x   name  y   mpg     geom point       scale x discrete guide   guide axis n dodge   2

[r] Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

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