Spacing between ticks and axis labels

[Edward Schwartz]

Hi,

It seems that there is no way to adjust the space between tick labels and axis labels. This seems to be a long standing problem [1].  Would it be possible to add a new margin for this, such as there is between the tick marks and the tick labels?

I am producing a figure that has large fonts for a slide.  Unfortunately, this makes the spacing between the tick labels and axis labels seem inadequate.  Using vjust helps a little bit, but is still not great.  Here's what I have right now [2].

Thanks for your consideration!

Ed

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ggplot2/mK9DR3dKIBU

[2] http://plaid.cylab.cmu.edu:8080/~ed/temp-1w/LoopsVsTotalFWPCorrectnessCCS.pdf

[Ista Zahn]

You can in fact pass negative values to vjust (this feels dirty, as
the documentation states that these values must be in the [0, 1]
range, but it works). Passing vjust = -5 works:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=hp, y=mpg)) +
geom_point() +
theme(axis.title.x = element_text(vjust=-5))

except that the title is now outside the plotting area, so we also
have to increase the plot.margin:

library(grid)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=hp, y=mpg)) +
geom_point() +
theme(axis.title.x = element_text(vjust=-5) ,
plot.margin = (unit(c(.5, .5, 2, .5), "cm")))

HTH,
Ista

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[Edward Schwartz]

Hi Ista,

Thank you for the workaround.  I'll try this out on my graph.

I still think there should be an additional margin setting, though.  There are two problems with vjust hacks:

1. The vjust value is unintuitive to adjust.  At least for me, I just keep adjusting it until the graph looks "right".  A margin is specified in units which are easy to understand, and don't depend on the height/width of the text area.

2. Manually adjusting the plot margins should not be needed!

I'd be happy to develop a patch for this if there is any interest in incorporating it into ggplot2.

Ed