Moving matplotlib legend outside of the axis makes it cutoff by the figure box

Question

I m familiar with the following questions   Matplotlib savefig with a legend outside the plot  How to put the legend out of the plot  It seems that the answers in these questions have the luxury of being able to fiddle with the exact shrinking of the axis so that the legend fits    Shrinking the axes  however  is not an ideal solution because it makes the data smaller making it actually more difficult to interpret  particularly when its complex and there are lots of things going on     hence needing a large legend  The example of a complex legend in the documentation demonstrates the need for this because the legend in their plot actually completely obscures multiple data points   http   matplotlib sourceforge net users legend guide html legend-of-complex-plots   What I would like to be able to do is dynamically expand the size of the figure box to accommodate the expanding figure legend   import matplotlib pyplot as plt import numpy as np  x   np arange -2 np pi  2 np pi  0 1  fig   plt figure 1  ax   fig add subplot 111  ax plot x  np sin x   label  Sine   ax plot x  np cos x   label  Cosine   ax plot x  np arctan x   label  Inverse tan   lgd   ax legend loc 9  bbox to anchor  0 5 0   ax grid  on     Notice how the final label  Inverse tan  is actually outside the figure box  and looks badly cutoff - not publication quality     Finally  I ve been told that this is normal behaviour in R and LaTeX  so I m a little confused why this is so difficult in python    Is there a historical reason  Is Matlab equally poor on this matter   I have the  only slightly  longer version of this code on pastebin http   pastebin com grVjc007

User · Answer

Added  I found something that should do the trick right away  but the rest of the code below also offers an alternative   Use the subplots adjust   function to move the bottom of the subplot up   fig subplots adjust bottom 0 2     lt -- Change the 0 02 to work for your plot    Then play with the offset in the legend bbox to anchor part of the legend command  to get the legend box where you want it  Some combination of setting the figsize and using the subplots adjust bottom      should produce a quality plot for you   Alternative  I simply changed the line   fig   plt figure 1    to   fig   plt figure num 1  figsize  13  13   dpi 80  facecolor  w   edgecolor  k     and changed  lgd   ax legend loc 9  bbox to anchor  0 5 0     to  lgd   ax legend loc 9  bbox to anchor  0 5 -0 02     and it shows up fine on my screen  a 24-inch CRT monitor     Here figsize  M N  sets the figure window to be M inches by N inches  Just play with this until it looks right for you  Convert it to a more scalable image format and use GIMP to edit if necessary  or just crop with the LaTeX viewport option when including graphics

User · Answer

Here is another  very manual solution  You can define the size of the axis and paddings are considered accordingly  including legend and tickmarks   Hope it is of use to somebody   Example  axes size are the same       Code                                                         Plot table  colmap     0 0 1   blue            1 0 0   red            0 1 0   green            1 1 0   yellow            1 0 1   magenta            1 0 5 0 5   pink            0 5 0 5 0 5   gray            0 5 0 0   brown            1 0 5 0   orange              import matplotlib pyplot as plt import numpy as np  import collections df   collections OrderedDict   df  labels              GWP100a n kgCO2eq  n nasedf nasdf nadfs   human n pts    ressource n pts     df  all-petroleum long name      3 5 2  df  all-electric       5 5  1  3  df  HEV                3 5  2  1  df  PHEV               3 5  2  1   numLabels   len df values   0   numItems   len df -1 posX   np arange numLabels  1 width   1 0  numItems 1   fig   plt figure figsize  2 2   ax   fig add subplot 111  for iiItem in range 1 numItems 1     ax bar posX  iiItem-1  width  df values   iiItem   width  color colmap iiItem-1   label df keys   iiItem   ax set xticks posX width  0 5 numItems   xticklabels df  labels      --------------------------------------------------   Change padding and margins  insert legend  fig tight layout    tight margins leg   ax legend loc  upper left   bbox to anchor  1 02  1   borderaxespad 0  plt draw    to know size of legend  padLeft     ax get position   x0   fig get size inches   0  padBottom   ax get position   y0   fig get size inches   1  padTop        1 - ax get position   y0 - ax get position   height     fig get size inches   1  padRight      1 - ax get position   x0 - ax get position   width     fig get size inches   0  dpi         fig get dpi   padLegend   ax get legend   get frame   get width     dpi   widthAx   3  inches heightAx   3  inches widthTot   widthAx padLeft padRight padLegend heightTot   heightAx padTop padBottom    resize ipython window  optional  posScreenX   1366 2-10  pixel posScreenY   0  pixel canvasPadding   6  pixel canvasBottom   40  pixel ipythonWindowSize     0 x 1   2   3   format int round widthTot dpi   2 canvasPadding                                              int round heightTot dpi   2 canvasPadding canvasBottom                                              posScreenX posScreenY  fig canvas  tkcanvas master geometry ipythonWindowSize   plt draw    to resize ipython window  Has to be done BEFORE figure resizing     set figure size and ax position fig set size inches widthTot heightTot  ax set position  padLeft widthTot  padBottom heightTot  widthAx widthTot  heightAx heightTot   plt draw   plt show    --------------------------------------------------

User · Answer

Sorry EMS  but I actually just got another response from the matplotlib mailling list  Thanks goes out to Benjamin Root    The code I am looking for is adjusting the savefig call to   fig savefig  samplefigure   bbox extra artists  lgd    bbox inches  tight    Note that the bbox extra artists must be an iterable   This is apparently similar to calling tight layout  but instead you allow savefig to consider extra artists in the calculation  This did in fact resize the figure box as desired   import matplotlib pyplot as plt import numpy as np  plt gcf   clear   x   np arange -2 np pi  2 np pi  0 1  fig   plt figure 1  ax   fig add subplot 111  ax plot x  np sin x   label  Sine   ax plot x  np cos x   label  Cosine   ax plot x  np arctan x   label  Inverse tan   handles  labels   ax get legend handles labels   lgd   ax legend handles  labels  loc  upper center   bbox to anchor  0 5 -0 1   text   ax text -0 2 1 05   Aribitrary text   transform ax transAxes  ax set title  Trigonometry   ax grid  on   fig savefig  samplefigure   bbox extra artists  lgd text   bbox inches  tight     This produces      edit  The intent of this question was to completely avoid the use of arbitrary coordinate placements of arbitrary text as was the traditional solution to these problems  Despite this  numerous edits recently have insisted on putting these in  often in ways that led to the code raising an error  I have now fixed the issues and tidied the arbitrary text to show how these are also considered within the bbox extra artists algorithm

[python] Moving matplotlib legend outside of the axis makes it cutoff by the figure box

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