flot-axislabels: Axis Labels plugin for flot

Originally written by Xuan Luo. Maintained by Mark Cote.

Contributions:

• Xuan Luo
• Mark Cote
• stdexcept
• Clemens Stolle
• Michael Haddon
• andig
• Alex Pinkney

flot-axislabels provides flot with the ability to label axes. It supports any number of axes. It can render the labels with CSS transforms, in canvas, or with traditional CSS positioning ("HTML" mode). flot-axislabels attempts a graceful fallback from CSS to canvas to HTML if some modes are not supported. You can also force a particular lesser mode (canvas or HTML).

In both CSS and canvas modes, the y-axis labels are rotated to face the graph (90 degrees counter-clockwise for left-hand labels, and 90 degrees clockwise for right-hand labels). In HTML mode, y-axis labels are left horizontal (warning: this takes up a lot of space).

In CSS and HTML modes, each axis label belongs to the classes "axisLabels" and "[axisName]Label" (e.g. .xaxisLabel, .y2axisLabel, etc). You can use standard CSS properties to customize their appearance.

In canvas mode, you can set font size, family, and colour through flot options (see below).

Example

$(function () {
    var options = {
        axisLabels: {
            show: true
        },
        xaxes: [{
            axisLabel: 'foo',
        }],
        yaxes: [{
            position: 'left',
            axisLabel: 'bar',
        }, {
            position: 'right',
            axisLabel: 'bleem'
        }]
    };

    $.plot($("#placeholder"),
           yourData,
           options);
    );
});

Usage

flot-axislabel adds an axisLabels object to the global options object. It supports one option:

• show (bool): display all axis labels (default: true)

There are also several options added to the axis objects. The two main ones are

• axisLabel (string): the text you want displayed as the label
• axisLabelPadding (int): padding, in pixels, between the tick labels and the axis label (default: 2)

By default, if supported, flot-axislabels uses CSS transforms. You can force either canvas or HTML mode by setting axisLabelUseCanvas or axisLabelUseHtml, respectively, to true.

Canvas mode supports several other options:

• axisLabelFontSizePixels (int): the size, in pixels, of the font (default: 14)
• axisLabelFontFamily (string): the font family of the font (default: sans-serif)
• axisLabelColour (string): the font colour (default: black)

Compatibility

flot-axislabels should work with recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. It also works with IE 8 and 9. The canvas option does not seem to work with IE 8, even with excanvas.

License

flot-axislabels is released under the terms of the MIT License.