Question

I have the following graph that I generated using ggplot2

I had finalPlot as the ggplot object. To add labels I used

finalPlot + stat_bin() + scale_x_continuous('Solution Cost') + scale_y_continuous('Number of Solutions')`

How can I change the orientation of the y axis label to make it appear horizontal and if possible span it across two lines like

Number of
Solutions

Answer 1

For the rotation angle of the axis text you need to use element_text(). See this post on SO for some examples. For spacing over two lines I would add a "\n" on the location in the string where you want to put the newline.

This will set the correct orientation for the y axis text and force a line break:

finalPlot + ylab("Number of\nSolutions") + 
    theme(axis.title.y = element_text(angle = 0))