Right align rotated axis title in ggplot2

Question

How do I right-align the Y-axis title (\"Species\") with the axis labels (the three species names), such that the axis title is close to the gray panel? hjust d

Answer 1

You can use geom_text together with clip = "off" inside coord_flip() which will allow drawing plot element outside of the plot panel. Obviously you will have to play around with x and y to get the desired output with this manual method

library(ggplot2)

p <- ggplot(iris,
       aes(x = Species,
           y = Sepal.Width)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  labs(x = NULL,
       y = "Sepal Width") +
  coord_flip(clip = "off") + # add clip = off here
  theme(axis.title.y = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0))

p +
  # add axis title here
  geom_text(
    x = 3.5,
    y = 1.85,
    inherit.aes = FALSE,
    label = "Species",
    check_overlap = TRUE,
    hjust = 1,
    fontface = 'bold',
    size = 5
  ) +
  theme(plot.margin = unit(c(1, 1, 1, 2), "lines"))

^{Created on 2018-10-27 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}