Left-align tick mark labels in R ggplot

Question

I can find options to align the legend and axis labels in ggplot, but not for the tick mark labels.

Is it possible to have those labels not right-aligned to the graph plot-box, but left-aligned flush with either the start of the longest label, or some set distance from the overall graph-border?

Example:

set.seed(1)
library(ggplot2)
axisLabels.x <- c("This is a longer label", 
              "Short label", "Short label","Short label","Short label",
              "This is again a longer label")
labels.wrap  <- lapply(strwrap(axisLabels.x,50,simplify=F),paste,collapse="\n") # word wrap
gg <- data.frame(x=LETTERS[1:6], y=sample(1:10,6))
ggplot(gg) +
  geom_bar(aes(x,y, fill=x), stat="identity")+
  scale_x_discrete(labels=labels.wrap)+
  scale_fill_discrete(guide="none")+
  labs(x="",y="Response")+
  coord_flip()

enter image description here

Wanted:

enter image description here

possible duplicate of changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2 — user20650

loki loki · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-03T13:05:29

As it provides the solution, I make @user20650's comment an answer.

set.seed(1)
library(ggplot2)
axisLabels.x <- c("This is a longer label", 
                  "Short label", "Short label","Short label","Short label",
                  "This is again a longer label")
labels.wrap  <- lapply(strwrap(axisLabels.x,50,simplify=F),paste,collapse="\n") # word wrap
gg <- data.frame(x=LETTERS[1:6], y=sample(1:10,6))
plot <- ggplot(gg) +
  geom_bar(aes(x,y, fill=x), stat="identity")+
  scale_x_discrete(labels=labels.wrap)+
  scale_fill_discrete(guide="none")+
  labs(x="",y="Response")+
  coord_flip()

And here we go

plot + theme(axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 0))

Left-align tick mark labels in R ggplot

1 Answers