customize ggplot2 axis labels with different colors
Solution 1
You can provide a vector of colors to the axis.text.x
option of theme()
:
a <- ifelse(data$category == 0, "red", "blue")
ggplot(data, aes(x = x, y = y)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity", aes(fill = category)) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1, colour = a))
Solution 2
I, too, get the warning message mentioned in @Mark Neal's comment; it makes me nervous. Here's an alternative approach with the ggtext
package. You can wrap the categories for the x-axis in <span>
s and specify the color you want, and then use element_markdown
in the theme:
library(ggtext)
library(tidyverse)
data %>%
mutate(x.label = paste("<span style = 'color: ",
ifelse(y > 0, "black", "red"),
";'>",
x,
"</span>", sep = ""),
x.label = fct_reorder(x.label, as.character(x))) %>%
ggplot(aes(x=x.label, y=y)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity", aes(fill=category)) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_markdown(angle = 45, hjust = 1))
Solution 3
Building on a-s-k's answer I put this in a more flexible form using glue templates and a discrete scale. With this option you don't have to change your data but just define a labeler in the scale that does everything for you, this is handy if you want to color the x-axis in many similar plots with different data.
(In the case of the original question the color depends on more of the data, than just the x-values, but I guess this could still be handy for some users.)
library(ggtext)
library(tidyverse)
library(glue)
#Create data
x <- c("a","b","c","d","e","f")
y <- c("10", "9","-10","11","-3","-15")
data <- data.frame(x, y)
data$y <- as.numeric(as.character(data$y))
data$category <- ifelse(as.numeric(data$y)<0, 0, 1)
data$category <- as.factor(data$category)
# create the labels
my_labels <- glue_data(
data,
"<span style='color: {if_else(category==0, 'red', 'blue')}'>{x}</span>"
)
names(my_labels) <- data$x
# plot as you normally would
# use element_markdown as axis.text.x
# and the labels defined before as labels in a discrete scale
ggplot(data, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity", aes(fill=category)) +
theme(
axis.text.x = element_markdown(angle = 45, hjust = 1)
) +
scale_x_discrete(labels=my_labels)
Cyrus Mohammadian
Computational social scientist, former academic, currently working in the media and political advertising space.
Updated on July 10, 2022Comments
-
Cyrus Mohammadian almost 2 years
I have a basic bar graph I've created from ggplot2. The y variable contains both positive and negative values and about half the vector of values are negative. I would like to customize the axis labels such that when the y value of that corresponding x factor is a negative, its label is red. Here's a reproducible example:
#Create data x <- c("a","b","c","d","e","f") y <- c("10", "9","-10","11","-3","-15") data <- data.frame(x, y) data$y <- as.numeric(as.character(data$y)) data$category <- ifelse(as.numeric(data$y)<0, 0, 1) data$category <- as.factor(data$category) #Graph library(cowplot) #theme library(ggplot2) ggplot(data, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_bar(stat = "identity", aes(fill=category)) + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1)) + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(colour = "black"))
What I need is a way to change the label colors of "c", "e", and "f" to the color of my choosing. I tried toggling
theme(aes(axis.text.x=element_text(colour=Air_pricier)))
but that produced an error. Thanks in advance. -
andemexoax about 5 yearsIs there a more automatic manner to set the axis label color to match the legend colors? This is especially needed when there are more than 2 categories that are not easily defined from each other except by name.
-
Justapigeon almost 5 years@andemexoax use
mystrings <- c("vector","of","categories")
thena <- ifelse(data$category %in% mystrings, "red", "blue")
-
mjs over 4 years'@Sumedh' what if I want ONLY the label to be set in different color?
-
Mark Neal about 4 yearsThis is nice, though generates a warning message for me
Warning message: Vectorized input to "element_text()" is not officially supported. Results may be unexpected or may change in future versions of ggplot2.
-
A. Kassambara over 3 yearsIs there any other alternative using the ggplot2 standard verbs (without using an extension such as ggtext)?
-
A. S. K. over 3 yearsNot that I've been able to find. But if there's a standard
ggplot2
solution, I would love to use that instead! -
snaut over 2 yearsThis works nicely. you can also define this in the labels of
scale_x_discrete
so you don't have to change the x-values in your data. You can also create the labels in the discrete scale with glue templates for maximum flexibility and convenience. -
S. Robinson over 2 yearsI also tried this in combination with
facet_wrap
, and it looks like it has to be the same colour scheme across all facets; i.e. you can't have different colour sets on different facets.