Labels for X and Y axis about flot HOT 39 OPEN

If you look at my flot fork (github.com/thenduks/flot) there is 
rudimentary/early
support for axis labels. Right now x and y both work in firefox 3, and x works
everywhere (I think :)). There's still some issues with the yaxis for browsers 
other
than firefox 3.

This is mostly pending on the ability to display rotated text. There was a 
thread on
the mailing list about it some months ago. I think it's possible with enough 
hacking,
but is separate enough that I think that the hacking should be done in another
library which Flot can then use.

This keeps coming up, the latest discussion is here for reference:

http://groups.google.com/group/flot-graphs/browse_thread/thread/3e2585758c4f0e6e
/d9aa96a2909a4f00

jqplot have support for this, maybe this can be ported here?
http://www.jqplot.com/tests/axisLabelTests.php

This is not an Enhancement.  This is a pre-requisite to any chart. Could you 
modify
the ticket priority? 

Any updates yet on this feature being implemented?

Oystein: yeah. Canvas text support is beginning to emerge in the browsers. If 
I'm not
mistaken, support for it got added to excanvas some time ago. If someone would 
cook
up a patch and smoketest it in various browsers, it would certainly speed up 
the process.

sidnei, danshao: It'll appear faster if you help.

[deleted comment]

It doesn't have to be rotated - horizontal text would be good enough.

[deleted comment]

Why on earth is this only "medium" priority? A plot without axis labels is 
useless.

Why is this only an "enhancement"? Sounds like a bug to me.

I also believe the priority of this should be higher ...

I echo the higher-priority sentiment already expressed on this issue .. not 
that I think I have the skills to do anything better than a 
sort-of-works-sometimes hack...

got any updates on this? I wish to use months on the x-axis label.

I also think this issue should have higher priority. A plot without axis labels 
is like measurement data without uncertainty, you don't know what you are 
looking at.

Not that I don't want to see nice axis labels - Flot is doing the plotting, but 
you have all kinds of tools from jQuery and plain html/css to create your 
labels yourself...  It sure would be a nice enhancement, but hardly a bug.

@mimecine: this is true, but in terms of ease-of-use and code prettiness, it 
totally makes sense to me to have axis labels taken care of inside flot. I may 
switch to jqplot for just this reason.
higher-priority-plz +1

I find a simple way to add axes is to make a 3x3 table (with zeroed out 
borders) and put the graph in the middle cell. That gives you the surrounding 
cells to make any sort of labels, titles, or explanatory text, and closely link 
them to the graph. (And it makes it easy to position the graph on a page.) 
Sure, it would be nice to have something within flot for axes, but for the 
moment I find that a tables works fine.

I would really like to use Flot, but without easy-to use axes labels I will 
have to use something else.  There is limited use to a graph plotting tool, 
which requires a separate tool to control axes labels.

My vote is to raise the priority on this one...

I just started a plugin for axis labels. It currently only supports X and Y 
axis (not X2 or Y2). It supports both types: canvas text or HTML text

http://github.com/xuanluo/flot-axislabels

Issue 343 has been merged into this issue.

Hi. I created a plugin that allows axis labels by replacing one of the extreme 
(visible min/max) tick label by the axis label. It works for multiple axes and 
has the advantage of not having to mess around with plot sizes and fancy 
positioning. You can get it at 

https://github.com/RuiPereira/flot/raw/axislabels/jquery.flot.axislabels.js

and see a screenshot at

https://github.com/RuiPereira/flot/raw/axislabels/examples/axislabels_flot.png

FWIW, Rui Pereira's plugin seems to work pretty well, except it botches the 
centering of Y labels for me.  I used the textAlign property and now it seems 
better.  Unfortunately, the plugin is a bit inefficient, so i hope something 
gets added to the code soon.  My patch attached.

I can confirm last patch solve some annoying axislabel issues i've had ! thanks 
man !

[deleted comment]

Hi. Just to clarify, it seems that the patch on comment #25 refers to xuanluo 
(#22) plugin, not mine. The implementations are quite different.

The only full implementation of an axis title/label that I found was the one 
from xuanluo and modification by markrcote 
(https://github.com/markrcote/flot-axislabels), unfortunately it does not work 
for the new multiple axes method in the latest flot version (only does the 
first 2 axes, yaxis and y2axis which does not exist anymore). Anybody else has 
a full plugin for this issue? A chart without axis title/label, especially with 
multiple axes (like on a meteogram) can not really be used.

I fixed up my plugin (https://github.com/markrcote/flot-axislabels) to support 
N axes. I've tested it with Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE 9, and IE 8.  
Forcing canvas labels in IE 8 (via axisLabelForceCanvas) does not work at the 
moment, but the default mode (IE transforms + CSS positioning) does.

Great plugin! Could you add plot title as well?

Hi,

thanks for this plugin. Unfortunately I can not get the font-family to be 
changed. Can someone tell me how to do this? I tried:
yaxis: { axisLabelForceCanvas: true, axisLabel: 'y-Achse', axisLabelFontFamily: 
'Arial' }

Hm I kind of think that plot title is a bit out of scope of this plug-in and 
very easily done with regular HTML/CSS. However, I've gotten this request a few 
times, so I *may* add support for it at some point.

kaesebaron: Sorry, I made a mistake in the README. The option to force canvas 
is axisLabelUseCanvas, not axisLabelForceCanvas. I committed a fix to the 
README.

Thank you.

Bit of a shame the plugin by marcrcote is GPL. Any chance of changing the 
license? 

Hi all, I have added on to Mark's script for support of Flot 1.1 and the 
updated script can be found at https://github.com/mikeslim7/flot-axislabels. 
Only 1 change has been done on 2 places in the script so the rest of the 
functions are as Mark had made them. :-) Mike.

Issue 611 has been merged into this issue.