Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2?

Question

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?

Answer 1

You can modify the text for axis text using theme() and the x.axis.text argument. For example:

ggplot(data, aes(x, y)) +

geom_point() +

theme(x.axis.text = element_text(size = 12, angle = 90))

element_text() allows you to change several features of the text including size, orientation, color, and face.

You can do the same for the y-axis using "y.axis.text".