Axis overlay labels when setting base_size to ggplot2

Question

I am changing base_size to theme_set . When I look at the resulting graph on the screen, it looks great. However, when I save it as a PDF, the x-axis label is a little too close to the axis numbers.

One little thing:

  theme_set(theme_bw(base_size = 9)) 

doesn't cause any problems but

  theme_grey(theme_bw(base_size = 9)) 

does. Here is a graph example:

R code

 require(ggplot2) theme_set(theme_bw(base_size = 9)) #Data m = c(0.475, 0.491, 0.4800, 0.4318, 0.4797, 0.5718) m = c(m, 0.00252, 0.00228, 0.00254, 0.00291, 0.00247, 0.00201) m = c(m, 0.306, 0.260, 0.3067, 0.3471, 0.3073, 0.2357) s = c(0.0172, 0.0681, 0.0163, 0.0608, 0.0170, 0.1088) s = c(s, 0.000087, 0.000367, 0.000091, 0.000417, 0.000094, 0.000417) s = c(s, 0.0092, 0.0447, 0.0110, 0.0593, 0.0113, 0.0504) df = data.frame(m=m, s=s) df$data_set = as.factor(c("Data set 1", "Data set 2")) df$est = factor(rep(c("A", "B", "C"), each=2)) df$par = rep(c("c1", "c2", "c3"), each=6) g = ggplot(data =df, aes(y=est, x=m)) + geom_point() + geom_errorbarh(aes(xmax = m + 2*s, xmin = m-2*s), width=0.1) + facet_grid(data_set~par, scales="free_x") + xlab("Parameter value") + ylab("") g pdf("figure3.pdf", width=7.5, height=3.5) print(g) dev.off() 

Answer 1

I think this may be a problem with pdf . Using ggsave with vjust = -0.5 worked for me. I would replace the last three lines of your code with

 ggsave('figure3.pdf', g + opts(axis.title.x = theme_text(vjust = -0.5)), width = 7.5, height = 3.5) 

Here is the result.

Answer 2

By default, ggplot2 makes the axis headers so close to the axis text. The trick is to insert a newline character \n into the string

  xlab("\nParameter value") + ylab("")