What do hjust and vjust do when making a plot using ggplot?

ggplot2, plot, r

Solution

The value of `hjust` and `vjust` are only defined between 0 and 1:

- 0 means left-justified

- 1 means right-justified

Source: ggplot2, Hadley Wickham, page 196

(Yes, I know that in most cases you can use it beyond this range, but don't expect it to behave in any specific way. This is outside spec.)

`hjust` controls horizontal justification and `vjust` controls vertical justification.

An example should make this clear:

td <- expand.grid(
    hjust=c(0, 0.5, 1),
    vjust=c(0, 0.5, 1),
    angle=c(0, 45, 90),
    text="text"
)

ggplot(td, aes(x=hjust, y=vjust)) + 
    geom_point() +
    geom_text(aes(label=text, angle=angle, hjust=hjust, vjust=vjust)) + 
    facet_grid(~angle) +
    scale_x_continuous(breaks=c(0, 0.5, 1), expand=c(0, 0.2)) +
    scale_y_continuous(breaks=c(0, 0.5, 1), expand=c(0, 0.2))

To understand what happens when you change the `hjust` in axis text, you need to understand that the horizontal alignment for axis text is defined in relation not to the x-axis, but to the entire plot (where this includes the y-axis text). (This is, in my view, unfortunate. It would be much more useful to have the alignment relative to the axis.)

DF <- data.frame(x=LETTERS[1:3],y=1:3)
p <- ggplot(DF, aes(x,y)) + geom_point() + 
    ylab("Very long label for y") +
    theme(axis.title.y=element_text(angle=0))


p1 <- p + theme(axis.title.x=element_text(hjust=0)) + xlab("X-axis at hjust=0")
p2 <- p + theme(axis.title.x=element_text(hjust=0.5)) + xlab("X-axis at hjust=0.5")
p3 <- p + theme(axis.title.x=element_text(hjust=1)) + xlab("X-axis at hjust=1")

library(ggExtra)
align.plots(p1, p2, p3)

To explore what happens with `vjust` aligment of axis labels:

DF <- data.frame(x=c("a\na","b","cdefghijk","l"),y=1:4)
p <- ggplot(DF, aes(x,y)) + geom_point()

p1 <- p + theme(axis.text.x=element_text(vjust=0, colour="red")) + 
        xlab("X-axis labels aligned with vjust=0")
p2 <- p + theme(axis.text.x=element_text(vjust=0.5, colour="red")) + 
        xlab("X-axis labels aligned with vjust=0.5")
p3 <- p + theme(axis.text.x=element_text(vjust=1, colour="red")) + 
        xlab("X-axis labels aligned with vjust=1")


library(ggExtra)
align.plots(p1, p2, p3)

Problem

Every time I make a plot using ggplot, I spend a little while trying different values for hjust and vjust in a line like ``` + opts(axis.text.x = theme_text(hjust = 0.5)) ``` to get the axis labels to line up where the axis labels almost touch the axis, and are flush against it (justified to the axis, so to speak). However, I don't really understand what's going on. Often, `hjust = 0.5` gives such dramatically different results from `hjust = 0.6`, for example, that I haven't been able to figure it out just by playing around with different values. Can anyone point me to a comprehensive explanation of how hjust and vjust options work?

Original source