How to increase font size in a plot in R?

Question

You want something like the cex=1.5 argument to scale fonts 150 percent. But do see help(par) as there are also cex.lab, cex.axis, ...

Thus, to summarise the existing discussion, adding

cex.lab=1.5, cex.axis=1.5, cex.main=1.5, cex.sub=1.5

to your plot, where 1.5 could be 2, 3, etc. and a value of 1 is the default will increase the font size.

x <- rnorm(100)

cex doesn't change things

hist(x, xlim=range(x),
     xlab= "Variable Lable", ylab="density", main="Title of plot", prob=TRUE)

hist(x, xlim=range(x),
     xlab= "Variable Lable", ylab="density", main="Title of plot", prob=TRUE, 
     cex=1.5)

Add cex.lab=1.5, cex.axis=1.5, cex.main=1.5, cex.sub=1.5

hist(x, xlim=range(x),
     xlab= "Variable Lable", ylab="density", main="Title of plot", prob=TRUE, 
     cex.lab=1.5, cex.axis=1.5, cex.main=1.5, cex.sub=1.5)

Notice that "cex" does change things when the plot is made with text. For example, the plot of an agglomerative hierarchical clustering:

library(cluster)
data(votes.repub)
agn1 <- agnes(votes.repub, metric = "manhattan", stand = TRUE)
plot(agn1, which.plots=2)

will produce a plot with normal sized text:

and plot(agn1, which.plots=2, cex=0.5) will produce this one:

By trial and error, I've determined the following is required to set font size:

1. cex doesn't work in hist(). Use cex.axis for the numbers on the axes, cex.lab for the labels.
2. cex doesn't work in axis() either. Use cex.axis for the numbers on the axes.
3. In place of setting labels using hist(), you can set them using mtext(). You can set the font size using cex, but using a value of 1 actually sets the font to 1.5 times the default!!! You need to use cex=2/3 to get the default font size. At the very least, this is the case under R 3.0.2 for Mac OS X, using PDF output.
4. You can change the default font size for PDF output using pointsize in pdf().

I suppose it would be far too logical to expect R to (a) actually do what its documentation says it should do, (b) behave in an expected fashion.