ggplot2 polar plot axis label location

12
votes

This is just a extension for a old question ggplot2 polar plot arrows Compass plot from MatLab

You will find the x axis is out of the most_out circle. In ggplot2, I use "panel.grid.major = theme_line(colour = "black", size = 0.2, linetype=2)" to get the dashed circle, just as below: using GGplot2 So my question is how to make the axis label (180, 135, 90, .....) outside of the circle, because the text are merge with the circular lines.

I try to use "hjust" or "vjust" to adjust the distance between text and axis. But it does not work. So do you have some ideas about this problem? Thanks first!!!!

2
rggplot2labelcoordinate
Without code to reproduce, it's difficult to provide specific answers. - Sim
I think you should submit a bug report, I recently mentioned the same issue on the ggplot2-dev mailing list if you need a minimal example. - baptiste
@boyang, why was my answer not acceptable? - Sim

2 Answers

2
votes

You have not provided code to reproduce the problem so this will be just a guess.

I've used whitespace, \n in particular, to move text "away" in the past. Perhaps a custom formatter might work here. Here is how you can write a custom tick mark label formatter.

If this fails, you can always hide the axis labels and paint them yourself using geom_text by adding another layer.

Hope this helps. @hadley's book on ggplot2 is very good, by the way.

0
votes

I came across this question while I was trying to fix a similar issue myself. One workaround is pretty much covered in the answer to this post: Remove extra space and ring at the edge of a polar plot

You would have to adjust the limits of the x scale to match your axis labels. You would also have to create a new scale bar corresponding to the radial length of your arrows (the 0-300 scale bar on the left side of your plot), since 

axis.text = element_blank

takes the scale bar away as well.