# How to set xlabel and ylabel in Makie recipe?

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-set-xlabel-and-ylabel-in-makie-recipe/68279
**Category:** Visualization
**Tags:** plotting, makie, recipe
**Created:** [September 16, 2021, 5:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-set-xlabel-and-ylabel-in-makie-recipe/68279 "2021-09-16T17:58:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![ConnectedSystems](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/connectedsystems/32/16815_2.png) [@ConnectedSystems](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ConnectedSystems)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2023, 12:17am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-set-xlabel-and-ylabel-in-makie-recipe/68279/3 "2023-01-06T00:17:53Z")

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I had the same question - unfortunately this thread is the first hit on google.

For those looking for the same answer:

Apparently what we want to do is not possible (yet, as of Jan 2023) as Makie recipes work on the “plot object level”, whereas the functions we want to use (`ylabel!()` etc) expect an Axis.

> [@Makie plot recipe collections?](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-plot-recipe-collections/86434/2):
>
> Just scattered across different repositories, there is no central recipe repo aside from Makie.jl. Makie recipes currently only work on the plot object level and cannot modify Axis, Colorbar, etc. Therefore we don’t have so many recipes yet, which usually involve axis labels etc when you look for example at the Plots.jl ecosystem.

The closest I found is to provide an axis keyword to the recipe, which isn’t ideal.  
Assuming `biplot()` is generated by a recipe, you should be able to do:

`biplot(... ; axis=(ylabel="My Y-Axis label",))`

Otherwise, it seems we have to define a custom plot function to do what we want, as suggested by @jules

> [@Makie: Combine plots into subplots](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/makie-combine-plots-into-subplots/62280/4):
>
> What I often do currently, because we don’t have subplot level recipes yet, is to make a function that receives either a Figure or a FigurePosition. If there’s no input argument, a new figure is created. This then works for both the single figure and subplot case. function myplot(f = Figure()) Axis(f[1, 1]) Colorbar(f[1, 2]) f end myplot() myplot(some\_figure[1:2, 3])

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