How can I manipulate the strip text of facet plots in ggplot2?

Question

I'm wondering how I can manipulate the size of strip text in facetted plots. My question is similar to a question on plot titles, but I'm specifically concerned with manipulating not the plot title but the text that appears in facet titles (strip_h).

As an example, consider the mpg dataset.

    library(ggplot2) 
    qplot(hwy, cty, data = mpg) + facet_grid( . ~ manufacturer)

The resulting output produces some facet titles that don't fit in the strip.

I'm thinking there must be a way to use grid to deal with the strip text. But I'm still a novice and wasn't sure from the grid appendix in Hadley's book how, precisely, to do it. Also, I was afraid if I did it wrong it would break my washing machine, since I believe all technology is connected through The Force :-(

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can modify strip.text.x (or strip.text.y) using theme_text(), for instance

qplot(hwy, cty, data = mpg) + 
      facet_grid(. ~ manufacturer) + 
      opts(strip.text.x = theme_text(size = 8, colour = "red", angle = 90))