# How can I make my pgfplots ylabel multiline?

My pgfplots ylabel text is too long and looks strange. Can I make it multiline?

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## 1 Answer

The ylabel can be adjusted like other nodes. The key you can use for this is ylabel syle={<options>}.

To make it multiline, you can either just provide a text alignment option, using align=<center/left/right/justify>, and then insert the line breaks manually with \\.

The second option is to provide a text width that the text should keep to, using text width=<width>, and it will automatically wrap around. By default, the text will be left aligned, but you can use the align key here, too.

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[width=6cm,
ylabel style={align=center}, ylabel=A very long\\long\\text as a label,
xlabel style={text width=2.5cm}, xlabel=This is a long xlabel]
\addplot {x^2};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


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Thanks again. :) –  shino Apr 20 '11 at 13:41
@Jake Did anything change since you posted your answer? I get an error-message saying: "I do not know the key '/tikz/align' and I am going to ignore it." –  John Oct 25 '12 at 23:55
@John: That sounds like you're using a very old version of TikZ. The current version is 2.1, you're probably using 2.0 (which is several years old). –  Jake Oct 26 '12 at 9:10
@Jake This is odd because I downloaded TeXShop (Version 2.47) a couple of month ago. Why should the package include an outdated distribution? –  John Oct 26 '12 at 13:52
@John: Okay, so you've got an outdated version of TeX Live and TikZ. The best thing to do what probably be to install TeX Live 2012. Alternatively, you could just update the TikZ package. –  Jake Oct 26 '12 at 14:26
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