How to increase font size in a plot in R

Question

I am confused  What is the right way to increase font size of text in the title  labels and other places of a plot    For example  x  lt - rnorm 100  hist x  xlim range x   xlab   Variable Label         ylab  density   main  Title of plot   prob TRUE  ps 30    The ps argument does not change font size  but it says in R Help for  par that it is for  the point size of text  but not symbols     Also is it possible to separate changing the font size from the plotting function such as hist

User · Answer

I came across this when I wanted to make the axis labels smaller, but leave everything else the same size. The command that worked for me, was to put:

par(cex.axis=0.5)

Before the plot command. Just remember to put:

par(cex.axis=1.0)

After the plot to make sure that the fonts go back to the default size.

User · Answer

For completeness  scaling text by 150  with cex   1 5  here is a full solution   cex  lt - 1 5 par cex lab cex  cex axis cex  cex main cex  plot      par cex lab 1  cex axis 1  cex main 1    I recommend wrapping things like this to reduce boilerplate  e g    plot cex  lt - function x  y  cex 1 5           par cex lab cex  cex axis cex  cex main cex    plot x  y         par cex lab 1  cex axis 1  cex main 1    invisible 0      which you can then use like this   plot cex x 1 5  y rnorm 5   cex 1 3    The     are known as ellipses in R and are used to pass additional parameters on to functions  Hence  they are commonly used for plotting  So  the following works as expected   plot cex x 1 5  y rnorm 5   cex 1 5  ylim c -0 5 0 5

User · Answer

In case you want to increase the font of the labels of the histogram when setting labels TRUE  bp hist values  labels   FALSE    main  Histogram    xlab  xlab  ylab  ylab    cex main 2  cex lab 2 cex axis 2   text x bp mids  y bp counts  labels bp counts  cex 2 pos 3

User · Answer

By trial and error  I ve determined the following is required to set font size    cex doesn t work in hist    Use cex axis for the numbers on the axes  cex lab for the labels  cex doesn t work in axis   either  Use cex axis for the numbers on the axes  In place of setting labels using hist    you can set them using mtext    You can set the font size using cex  but using a value of 1 actually sets the font to 1 5 times the default    You need to use cex 2 3 to get the default font size  At the very least  this is the case under R 3 0 2 for Mac OS X  using PDF output  You can change the default font size for PDF output using pointsize in pdf      I suppose it would be far too logical to expect R to  a  actually do what its documentation says it should do   b  behave in an expected fashion

User · Answer

You want something like the cex 1 5 argument to scale fonts 150 percent  But do see help par  as there are also cex lab  cex axis

User · Answer

Notice that  cex  does change things when the plot is made with text  For example  the plot of an agglomerative hierarchical clustering   library cluster  data votes repub  agn1  lt - agnes votes repub  metric    manhattan   stand   TRUE  plot agn1  which plots 2    will produce a plot with normal sized text     and plot agn1  which plots 2  cex 0 5  will produce this one

User · Answer

Thus  to summarise the existing discussion  adding  cex lab 1 5  cex axis 1 5  cex main 1 5  cex sub 1 5  to your plot  where 1 5 could be 2  3  etc  and a value of 1 is the default will increase the font size   x  lt - rnorm 100    cex doesn t change things  hist x  xlim range x        xlab   Variable Lable   ylab  density   main  Title of plot   prob TRUE   hist x  xlim range x        xlab   Variable Lable   ylab  density   main  Title of plot   prob TRUE        cex 1 5      Add cex lab 1 5  cex axis 1 5  cex main 1 5  cex sub 1 5  hist x  xlim range x        xlab   Variable Lable   ylab  density   main  Title of plot   prob TRUE        cex lab 1 5  cex axis 1 5  cex main 1 5  cex sub 1 5

[r] How to increase font size in a plot in R?

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