Placement of scale tick labels in pgfplots

Question

When i use scale ticks in my plots i can't get those multiplicators to move anywhere. So basically i use plots like:

\documentclass[border=5mm]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
 \begin{document}
  \begin{tikzpicture} 
    \begin{axis}[scaled ticks=true]
    \addplot coordinates { (20000,0.0005) (40000,0.0010) (60000,0.0020)}; 
    \end{axis}
  \end{tikzpicture}%
 \end{document}

which gives:

So my Question is: How can i get this x tick scale label to move onto the right side of the right y-axis? So that it is above the x-axis? (The mind behind this question is, that i sometimes have large x-labels, which then are very close to the scale label)

Answer 1

You should use the key: every x tick scale label which lets you overwrite the default placements. Notice that the keyword at within this style refers to the absolute size of the axis environment and are not in cm or pt.

So:

every x tick scale label/.style={
    at={(1,0)},xshift=1pt,anchor=south west,inner sep=0pt
}

will make the x tick scale be at the graph south east corner, shifted 1 pt to the right and anchored at south west (making sure that it is not overlapping with the graph).

Inserting this in your code yields:

You can always play with the yshift etc. as well.

For reference, the default option for x-tick scale placement is:

every x tick scale label/.style={at={(xticklabel cs:0.9,5pt)},yshift=-2em,left,inner sep=0pt}

where you should notice that the xticklabel cs is the coordinate system in the x-axis. Thus you can use this to manually place it according to the x-tick labels. Try for instance:

every x tick scale label/.style={at={(xticklabel cs:1)},anchor=south west}