Is it possible to switch the side of y-axis breaks and labels on a faceted plot?

Question

By default, on a faceted ggplot (facet_grid), the y-axis facet labels are on the right and the y-axis breaks and labels are on the left.

Is it possible to switch the

Answer 1

I wrote this for my needs. If you use it with switch = "y", you're halfway done.

You still need to modify it to switch the axis, which may take some more work because the axis and breaks form one column in a gtable, so you'll need to decompose it further.

switch_facet_strip <- function(p, switch = c("x", "y")) {

  require(gtable)
  rbind_gtable <- gtable:::rbind_gtable
  cbind_gtable <- gtable:::cbind_gtable

  if ("y" %in% switch)
    p <- p + theme(strip.text.y = element_text(vjust = 0.5, angle = 90))

  g <- ggplotGrob(p)


  gdim <- as.numeric(g$layout[g$layout$name == "background", c("b", "r")])
  tpos <- g$layout[g$layout$name == "strip-top", "b"][1]
  rpos <- g$layout[g$layout$name == "strip-right", "r"][1]
  new_tpos <- g$layout[g$layout$name == "axis-b", "b"][1] + 1
  new_rpos <- g$layout[g$layout$name == "axis-l", "r"][1] - 1

  if ("x" %in% switch) {
    g <- rbind_gtable(
           rbind_gtable(
               gtable_add_rows(
                 rbind_gtable(g[1:tpos-1, ] , g[(tpos+1):(new_tpos-1), ], "first"),
                 unit(5, units = "mm")),
               g[tpos, ], "first"),
           g[new_tpos:gdim[1], ], "first")
  }

  if ("y" %in% switch) {
    g <- cbind_gtable(
           cbind_gtable(
             gtable_add_cols(
               cbind_gtable(g[, 1:new_rpos], g[, rpos], "first"),
               unit(5, units = "mm")),
             g[, (new_rpos+2):rpos-1], "first"),
           g[, (rpos+1):gdim[2]], "first")
  }

  grid.newpage()
  grid.draw(g)
}

Note: This hack allows me to switch both strips next to their respective axis label. It only makes sense if you are using a theme in which strip have no backgrounds. I think this is the right way to display facet labels because it allows to read the plot like a multiway table. Moreover, the facet labels are next to the axes breaks, which makes it much more obvious what the axes represent. Anyone else thinks this makes sense? I wish it were an option in ggplot.