Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

Question

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  lt - paste  quot Super Dee-Duper quot  as character diamonds cut   q  lt - qplot cut carat data diamonds geom  quot boxplot quot   q   opts axis text x theme text angle -90

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To make the text on the tick labels fully visible and read in the same direction as the y-axis label  change the last line to   q   theme axis text x element text angle 90  hjust 1

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ggplot 3 3 0 fixes this by providing guide axis angle   90   as guide argument to scale    or as x argument to guides   library ggplot2  data diamonds  diamonds cut  lt - paste  quot Super Dee-Duper quot   as character diamonds cut    ggplot diamonds  aes cut  carat       geom boxplot       scale x discrete guide   guide axis angle   90             or  equivalently      guides x    guide axis angle   90       NULL   From the documentation of the angle argument   Compared to setting the angle in theme     element text    this also uses some heuristics to automatically pick the hjust and vjust that you probably want    Alternatively  it also provides  guide axis n dodge   2   as guide argument to scale    or as x argument to guides  to overcome the over-plotting problem by dodging the labels vertically  It works quite well in this case  library ggplot2  data diamonds  diamonds cut  lt - paste  quot Super Dee-Duper quot  as character diamonds cut    ggplot diamonds  aes cut  carat        geom boxplot       scale x discrete guide   guide axis n dodge   2       NULL

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I d like to provide an alternate solution  a robust solution similar to what I am about to propose was required in the latest version of ggtern  since introducing the canvas rotation feature   Basically  you need to determine the relative positions using trigonometry  by building a function which returns an element text object  given angle  ie degrees  and positioning  ie one of x y top or right  information    Load Required Libraries library ggplot2  library gridExtra    Build Function to Return Element Text Object rotatedAxisElementText   function angle position  x      angle       angle 1      position    position 1    positions   list x 0 y 90 top 180 right 270    if  position  in  names positions       stop sprintf   position  must be one of   s   paste names positions  collapse        call  FALSE    if  is numeric angle       stop   angle  must be numeric  call  FALSE    rads     angle - positions   position     pi 180   hjust   0 5  1 - sin rads     vjust   0 5  1   cos rads     element text angle angle vjust vjust hjust hjust      Frankly  in my opinion  I think that an  auto  option should be made available in ggplot2 for the hjust and vjust arguments  when specifying the angle  anyway  lets demonstrate how the above works    Demonstrate Usage for a Variety of Rotations df      data frame x 0 5 y 0 5  plots   lapply seq 0 90 length out 4  function a     ggplot df aes x y          geom point          theme axis text x   rotatedAxisElementText a  x              axis text y   rotatedAxisElementText a  y          labs title   sprintf  Rotated  s  a      grid arrange grobs plots    Which produces the following

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An alternative to coord flip   is to use the ggstance package  The advantage is that it makes it easier to combine the graphs with other graph types and you can  maybe more importantly  set fixed scale ratios for your coordinate system    library ggplot2  library ggstance   diamonds cut  lt - paste  Super Dee-Duper   as character diamonds cut    ggplot data diamonds  aes carat  cut     geom boxploth       Created on 2020-03-11 by the reprex package  v0 3 0

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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     The image above is from this blog post

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Use coord flip   data diamonds  diamonds cut  lt - paste  quot Super Dee-Duper quot  as character diamonds cut    qplot cut  carat  data   diamonds  geom    quot boxplot quot       coord flip      Add str wrap     wrap text to no more than 15 spaces library stringr  diamonds cut2  lt - str wrap diamonds cut  width   15  qplot cut2  carat  data   diamonds  geom    quot boxplot quot       coord flip      In Ch 3 9 of R for Data Science  Wickham and Grolemund speak to this exact question   coord flip   switches the x and y axes  This is useful  for example   if you want horizontal boxplots  It   s also useful for long labels  it   s hard to get them to fit without overlapping on the x-axis

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The ggpubr package offers a shortcut that does the right thing by default  right align text  middle align text box to tick      library ggplot2  diamonds cut  lt - paste  Super Dee-Duper   as character diamonds cut   q  lt - qplot cut  carat  data   diamonds  geom    boxplot   q   ggpubr  rotate x text       Created on 2018-11-06 by the reprex package  v0 2 1   Found with a GitHub search for the relevant argument names  https   github com search l R amp q element text angle 90 vjust org 3Acran amp type Code

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OUTDATED - see this answer for a simpler approach   To obtain readable x tick labels without additional dependencies  you want to use            theme axis text x   element text angle   90  hjust   1  vjust   0 5            This rotates the tick labels 90   counterclockwise and aligns them vertically at their end  hjust   1  and their centers horizontally with the corresponding tick mark  vjust   0 5   Full example  library ggplot2  data diamonds  diamonds cut  lt - paste  quot Super Dee-Duper quot  as character diamonds cut   q  lt - qplot cut carat data diamonds geom  quot boxplot quot   q   theme axis text x   element text angle   90  hjust   1  vjust   0 5      Note  that vertical horizontal justification parameters vjust hjust of element text are relative to the text  Therefore  vjust is responsible for the horizontal alignment  Without vjust   0 5 it would look like this  q   theme axis text x   element text angle   90  hjust   1     Without hjust   1 it would look like this  q   theme axis text x   element text angle   90  vjust   0 5     If for some  wired  reason you wanted to rotate the tick labels 90   clockwise  such that they can be read from the left  you would need to use  q   theme axis text x   element text angle   -90  vjust   0 5  hjust   -1    All of this has already been discussed in the comments of this answer but I come back to this question so often  that I want an answer from which I can just copy without reading the comments

[r] Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

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