Labeling Axes

When creating a chart, you want to tell the viewer what data they are viewing. To do this, you need to label the axis.

Scale Title Configuration

The scale label configuration is nested under the scale configuration in the scaleLabel key. It defines options for the scale title. Note that this only applies to cartesian axes.

NameTypeDefaultDescription
displaybooleanfalseIf true, display the axis title.
labelStringstring''The text for the title. (i.e. "# of People" or "Response Choices").
lineHeightnumber|string1.2Height of an individual line of text (see MDN).
fontColorColor'#666'Font color for scale title.
fontFamilystring"'Helvetica Neue', 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif"Font family for the scale title, follows CSS font-family options.
fontSizenumber12Font size for scale title.
fontStylestring'normal'Font style for the scale title, follows CSS font-style options (i.e. normal, italic, oblique, initial, inherit).
paddingnumber|object4Padding to apply around scale labels. Only top and bottom are implemented.

Creating Custom Tick Formats

It is also common to want to change the tick marks to include information about the data type. For example, adding a dollar sign ('$'). To do this, you need to override the ticks.callback method in the axis configuration.In the following example, every label of the Y axis would be displayed with a dollar sign at the front.

If the callback returns null or undefined the associated grid line will be hidden.

  1. var chart = new Chart(ctx, {
  2. type: 'line',
  3. data: data,
  4. options: {
  5. scales: {
  6. yAxes: [{
  7. ticks: {
  8. // Include a dollar sign in the ticks
  9. callback: function(value, index, values) {
  10. return '$' + value;
  11. }
  12. }
  13. }]
  14. }
  15. }
  16. });