Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

593 Asked by AryanKhan in Data Science , Asked on Jun 15, 2021

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?

Answered by Mason Lee

To change font size ggplot2 and direction of the axes, add the following function to your plot:

theme(text = element_text(size=15),axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1)) 

angle rotates the text, and hjust controls the horizontal justification.

For example:

data(iris)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Species, y=Sepal.Length)) +

  geom_jitter(width = 0.1, alpha = 0.5) +

  theme(text = element_text(size=15),axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1))

Output:

Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

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