How to rotate the axis labels in ggplot2?

Question

I have the following graph that I generated using ggplot2 enter image description here

I had finalPlot as the ggplot object. To add labels I used

finalPlot + stat_bin() + scale_x_continuous('Solution Cost') + scale_y_continuous('Number of Solutions')`

How can I change the orientation of the y axis label to make it appear horizontal and if possible span it across two lines like

Number of
Solutions

As far as I can see the answer below is now obsolete since `'opts'` is deprecated (is now `'theme'`) as is `theme_text()` (for `'element_text'`).. — geotheory, Oct 28 '13 at 11:55

score 19 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 27 '14 at 02:22

The syntax has changed in recent versions of ggplot2; if you try the above answer, you'll get

Error: Use 'theme' instead. (Defunct; last used in version 0.9.1)

These days you should use

finalPlot + ylab("Number of\nSolutions") + theme(axis.title.y = element_text(angle=0))

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 05 '17 at 11:45

8

For the rotation angle of the axis text you need to use element_text(). See this post on SO for some examples. For spacing over two lines I would add a "\n" on the location in the string where you want to put the newline.

This will set the correct orientation for the y axis text and force a line break:

finalPlot + ylab("Number of\nSolutions") + 
    theme(axis.title.y = element_text(angle = 0))

edited Dec 05 '17 at 11:45

PatrickT

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answered Apr 08 '12 at 15:00

Paul Hiemstra

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No, this is not what I want. This one changes the orientation of the ticks. I want to rotate the axis label, not the axis tick label – Ankit Apr 08 '12 at 15:20
You can probably take this solution and adapt it to your situation quite easily... – Paul Hiemstra Apr 08 '12 at 15:49
But I do not know what the corresponding parameters will be :( – Ankit Apr 08 '12 at 15:51
1

Just type `theme_text()` on the command prompt to get a list of the options you can set. I guess what need is `title.text` – Paul Hiemstra Apr 08 '12 at 16:11
4

`axis.title.theme.y` is for the axis label `axis.text.theme.y` is for the axis values – Richard Williams Apr 18 '12 at 10:27

How to rotate the axis labels in ggplot2?

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