Bivariate legend label options don't alter anything

[ryanzomorrodi]

Hi, it seems that many of the xlab and ylab options for bivariate legends don't work. For example, while I can change the legend title font family, the same cannot be said for the x of y labels. Likewise, align and font face also don't seem to work.

Reprex:

library(tmap)

tm_shape(land) +
  tm_raster(
    col = tm_vars(c("trees", "elevation"), multivariate = TRUE),
    col.scale = tm_scale_bivariate(
      values = "pu_gn_bivs",
      scale1 = tm_scale_intervals(breaks = c(0, 33, 66, 100)),
      scale2 = tm_scale_intervals(
        breaks = c(-500, 1500, 4000, 6500),
        labels = c("L", "M", "H")
      )
    ),
    col.legend = tm_legend_bivariate(
      title = "Title",
      xlab = "Scale 1",
      ylab = "Scale 2",
      title.align = "center",
      title.fontfamily = "monospace",
      title.fontface = 3,
      xlab.align = "center",
      xlab.fontfamily = "monospace",
      ylab.fontfamily = "monospace",
      xlab.fontface = 3,
      ylab.fontface = 3,
      item.height = 3,
      item.width = 3
    )
  )
#> [scale] tm_raster:() the data variable assigned to 'col' contains positive and negative values, so midpoint is set to 0. Set 'midpoint = NA' in 'fill.scale = tm_scale_intervals(<HERE>)' to use all visual values (e.g. colors)
#> [plot mode] fit legend/component: Some legend items or map compoments do not
#> fit well, and are therefore rescaled.
#> ℹ Set the tmap option `component.autoscale = FALSE` to disable rescaling.
#> Labels abbreviated by the first letters, e.g.: "L" => "L"

Session info:

─ Session info ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13)
 os       Arch Linux
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       America/Chicago
 date     2025-10-07
 pandoc   NA
 quarto   1.7.32 @ /usr/share/positron/resources/app/quarto/bin/quarto

─ Packages ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package        * version    date (UTC) lib source
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 leaflegend       1.2.1      2024-05-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
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 tmap           * 4.2.0.9000 2025-10-07 [1] Github (r-tmap/tmap@f1f6476)
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 [1] /home/user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.5
 [2] /usr/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

[mtennekes]

font family and face working.

align not yet: this requires more effort. As a workaround you can just put some whitespace before, e.g. xlab = " Scale 1"

[ryanzomorrodi]

Awesome! Thank you

[blp92]

Just wanted to add to this that it appears rot is not working either, and from what I can tell the calculation of the text bounding box is done prior to the rotation being applied. I want to make the legend for the bivariate choropleth map similar to the one found on this page using ggplot2. So I run ylab.rot = 90, and the ylab is then centered on the upper left corner of the legend bounding box. I found this open ticket and tried the trick where I add whitespace via spaces to the ylab, but this never changes the location of the rotated label. It does expand the length of the bounding box of the legend which is what leads me to believe that the calculation of the text bounding box (probably the wrong term here, but the space calculated for the length of the string needed for the ylab) is done and then a rotation is applied.

I've never stepped through the function calls and logic of the way a plot gets made, and it's definitely beyond my ken. From what I can tell, in line 135 of tm_polygons, it pulls the arguments passed to tm_legend, of which tm_legend_bivariate is a type, and adds them to args$xlab, which is passed to the tm_element_list which builds a tm_element that gets used somewhere to build the plot? Is that correct? If so, where does the "polygon" tm_element layer get passed to?