I can never remember how to rotate the x-axis labels with ggplot2: theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5))

rotate-axis-labels-ggplot2.R

# Adapted from https://stackoverflow.com/a/7267364/1036500 by Andrie de Vries

# This is it: theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5))

library(ggplot2)

td <- expand.grid(
  hjust=c(0, 0.5, 1),
  vjust=c(0, 0.5, 1),
  angle=c(0, 45, 90),
  text="text"
)

td$angle_exp <- 
  with(td, 
       ifelse(angle == 0, "angle = 0",
              ifelse(angle == 45, "angle = 45",
                     "angle = 90")))
,

ggplot(td, aes(x=hjust, 
               y=vjust)) + 
  geom_point(colour = "red",
             size = 5) +
  geom_text(aes(label=text, 
                angle=angle, 
                hjust=hjust, 
                vjust=vjust),
            size = 5) + 
  facet_grid(~angle_exp) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=c(0, 0.5, 1), 
                     expand=c(0, 0.2)) +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=c(0, 0.5, 1), 
                     expand=c(0, 0.2)) +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 18) +
  ggtitle("To rotate x-axis label text 90 degrees we use:\ntheme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5))")

There is an alternative since 3.3.0: stackoverflow

guides(x=guide_axis(angle = 90))

the h/v-just are set automatically sensibly