Hi,
QCPAxis::setTickLabelSide works almost perfectly for me in 1.3.0beta, a couple of things that could be improved:
1. Putting tick labels on lsInside leads often to the fist and last label of the axis being clipped (i.e. partially displayed because crossing the AxisRect boundaries). I think it would be better if clipped labels were not displayed at all.
2. It would be nice to have access to "the rectangle encompassing all the currently displayed tick labels" (of a given axis). This would allow to avoid overlapping the labels when positioning extra items (e.g. QCPItemText).
MaX.