How to specify legend position in matplotlib in graph coordinates

Question

I am aware of the bbox to anchor keyword and this thread  which very helpfully suggests how to manually place the legend   How to put the legend out of the plot  However  I d like to use the coordinates of my x- and y-axis in the graph to specify the legend position  inside the plot   as I might need to move the figure into a large figure with a different axis environment  and I don t want to manually play around with those coordinates every time I do this  Is this possible   Edit  A small example is here   import numpy as n f  axarr   plt subplots 2 sharex True  axarr 1  set ylim  0 611 0 675   axarr 0  set ylim  0 792 0 856    axarr 0  plot  0  0 04  0 08  n array   0 83333333   0 82250521 0 81109048    label  test1    axarr 0  errorbar  0  0 04  0 08  n array   0 8   0 83    0 82   n array  0 1 0 1 0 01    label  test2    axarr 1  plot  0  0 04  0 08  n array   0 66666667   0 64888304   0 63042428    axarr 1  errorbar  0  0 04  0 08  n array   0 67   0 64   0 62   n array   0 01   0 05   0 1    axarr 0  legend bbox to anchor  0 04  0 82  1    102  labelspacing 0 1        handlelength 0 1  handletextpad 0 1 frameon False  ncol 4  columnspacing 0 7      I think what confuses me is that the legend does not actually start at 0 82  and indeed for my larger plot  with 5 subplots of this type   I need to use legend coordinates bbox to anchor  0 04  1 15  1    102  in order to make the legend appear on coordinates  0 02  0 83   But maybe I am getting something else wrong

User · Answer

In addition to  ImportanceOfBeingErnest s post  I use the following line to add a legend at an absolute position in a plot     plt legend bbox to anchor  1 0 1 0        bbox transform plt gcf   transFigure    For unknown reasons  bbox transform fig transFigure does not work with me

User · Answer

According to the matplotlib legend documentation      The location can also be a 2-tuple giving the coordinates of the lower-left corner of the legend in axes coordinates  in which case bbox to anchor will be ignored     Thus  one could use   plt legend loc  x  y     to set the legend s lower left corner to the specified  x  y  position

User · Answer

You can change location of legend using loc argument   https   matplotlib org api pyplot api html matplotlib pyplot legend  import matplotlib pyplot as plt  plt subplot 211  plt plot  1 2 3   label  test1   plt plot  3 2 1   label  test2     Place a legend above this subplot  expanding itself to   fully use the given bounding box  plt legend bbox to anchor  0   1 02  1    102   loc 3             ncol 2  mode  expand   borderaxespad 0    plt subplot 223  plt plot  1 2 3   label  test1   plt plot  3 2 1   label  test2     Place a legend to the right of this smaller subplot  plt legend bbox to anchor  1 05  1   loc 2  borderaxespad 0    plt show

User · Answer

The loc parameter specifies in which corner of the bounding box the legend is placed  The default for loc is  loc  best  which gives unpredictable results when the bbox to anchor argument is used  Therefore  when specifying bbox to anchor  always specify loc as well   The default for bbox to anchor is  0 0 1 1   which is a bounding box over the complete axes  If a different bounding box is specified  is is usually sufficient to use the first two values  which give  x0  y0  of the bounding box    Below is an example where the bounding box is set to position  0 6 0 5   green dot  and different loc parameters are tested  Because the legend extents outside the bounding box  the loc parameter may be interpreted as  which corner of the legend shall be placed at position given by the 2-tuple bbox to anchor argument       import matplotlib pyplot as plt plt rcParams  figure figsize     6  3 fig  axes   plt subplots ncols 3  locs     upper left    lower left    center right   for l  ax in zip locs  axes flatten         ax set title l      ax plot  1 2 3   2 3 1    b-   label  blue       ax plot  1 2 3   1 2 1    r-   label  red       ax legend loc l  bbox to anchor  0 6 0 5       ax scatter  0 6   0 5   s 81  c  limegreen   transform ax transAxes   plt tight layout       plt show     See especially this answer for a detailed explanation and the question What does a 4-element tuple argument for   39 bbox to anchor  39  mean in matplotlib       If you want to specify the legend position in other coordinates than axes coordinates  you can do so by using the bbox transform argument  If may make sense to use figure coordinates   ax legend bbox to anchor  1 0   loc  lower right    bbox transform fig transFigure    It may not make too much sense to use data coordinates  but since you asked for it this would be done via bbox transform ax transData

[python] How to specify legend position in matplotlib in graph coordinates

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