Consider the following
d = data.frame(y=rnorm(120),
x=rep(c("bar", "long category name", "foo"), each=40))
ggplot(d,aes(x=x,y=y)) +
geom_boxplot() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text(size=15, angle=90))
The x-axis labels are aligned by the center of the label. Is it possible to automatically align on the right so that every label would end right below the graph?
This is precisely what the hjust and vjust parameters are for in ggplot. They control the horizontal and vertical justification respectively and range from 0 to 1. See this question for more details on justifications and their values (What do hjust and vjust do when making a plot using ggplot?).
To get the labels the way you want you can use:
hjust = 0.95 (to leave some space between the labels and the axis)vjust = 0.2 (to center them in this case)ggplot(d,aes(x=x,y=y)) + geom_boxplot() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text(size=15, angle=90,hjust=0.95,vjust=0.2))
Alternatively, flip the axis, your customers will thank you and have less neck pain (plus, I find most boxplots easier to interpret with this orientation):
ggplot(d, aes(x = x, y = y)) +
geom_boxplot() +
coord_flip()
