Changing font size and direction of axes text in ggplot2

Question

Use theme():

d <- data.frame(x=gl(10, 1, 10, labels=paste("long text label ", letters[1:10])), y=rnorm(10))
ggplot(d, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() +
    theme(text = element_text(size=20),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1)) 
#vjust adjust the vertical justification of the labels, which is often useful

There's lots of good information about how to format your ggplots here. You can see a full list of parameters you can modify (basically, all of them) using ?theme.

Ditto @Drew Steen on the use of theme(). Here are common theme attributes for axis text and titles.

ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = factor(cyl), y = mpg))+
  geom_point()+
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(color = "grey20", size = 20, angle = 90, hjust = .5, vjust = .5, face = "plain"),
        axis.text.y = element_text(color = "grey20", size = 12, angle = 0, hjust = 1, vjust = 0, face = "plain"),  
        axis.title.x = element_text(color = "grey20", size = 12, angle = 0, hjust = .5, vjust = 0, face = "plain"),
        axis.title.y = element_text(color = "grey20", size = 12, angle = 90, hjust = .5, vjust = .5, face = "plain"))

Adding to previous solutions, you can also specify the font size relative to the base_size included in themes such as theme_bw() (where base_size is 11) using the rel() function.

For example:

ggplot(mtcars, aes(disp, mpg)) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(axis.text.x=element_text(size=rel(0.5), angle=90))

Use theme():

d <- data.frame(x=gl(10, 1, 10, labels=paste("long text label ", letters[1:10])), y=rnorm(10))
ggplot(d, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() +
theme(text = element_text(size=20))