How to make pylab savefig save image for maximized window instead of default size

Question

I am using pylab in matplotlib to create a plot and save the plot to an image file  However  when I save the image using pylab savefig  image name    I find that the SIZE image saved is the same as the image that is shown when I use pylab show     As it happens  I have a lot of data in the plot and when I am using pylab show    I have to maximize the window before I can see all of the plot correctly  and the xlabel tickers don t superimpose on each other   Is there anyway that I can programmatically  maximize  the window before saving the image to file  - at the moment  I am only getting the  default  window size image  which results in the x axis labels being superimposed on one another

User · Answer

I did the same search time ago  it seems that he exact solution depends on the backend   I have read a bunch of sources and probably the most useful was the answer by Pythonio here How to maximize a plt show   window using Python I adjusted the code and ended up with the function below   It works decently for me on windows  I mostly use Qt  where I use it quite often  while it is minimally tested with other backends   Basically it consists in identifying the backend and calling the appropriate function  Note that I added a pause afterwards because I was having issues with some windows getting maximized and others not  it seems this solved for me    def maximize backend None fullscreen False          Maximize window independently on backend      Fullscreen sets fullscreen mode  that is same as maximized  but it doesn t have title bar  press key F to toggle full screen mode          if backend is None          backend matplotlib get backend       mng   plt get current fig manager        if fullscreen          mng full screen toggle       else          if backend     wxAgg               mng frame Maximize True          elif backend     Qt4Agg  or backend     Qt5Agg               mng window showMaximized           elif backend     TkAgg               mng window state  zoomed    works fine on Windows          else              print   Unrecognized backend    backend   not tested on different backends  only Qt      plt show        plt pause 0 1   this is needed to make sure following processing gets applied  e g  tight layout

User · Answer

I think you need to specify a different resolution when saving the figure to a file   fig   matplotlib pyplot figure     generate your plot fig savefig  myfig png  dpi 600    Specifying a large dpi value should have a similar effect as maximizing the GUI window

User · Answer

You set the size on initialization   fig2   matplotlib pyplot figure figsize  8 0  5 0     in inches    Edit   If the problem is with x-axis ticks - You can set them  manually    fig2 add subplot 111  set xticks arange 1 3 0 5     You can actually compute the interval You need - and substitute here   And so on with other aspects of Your plot  You can configure it all  Here s an example   from numpy import arange import matplotlib   import matplotlib as mpl import matplotlib pyplot   import matplotlib pyplot as plt  x1    1 2 3  y1    4 5 6  x2    1 2 3  y2    5 5 5     initialization fig2   matplotlib pyplot figure figsize  8 0  5 0     The size of the figure is specified as  width  height  in inches    lines  l1   fig2 add subplot 111  plot x1 y1  label r Text  formula     r-   lw 2  l2   fig2 add subplot 111  plot x2 y2  label r  legend2     g--   lw 3  fig2 add subplot 111  legend  l1 l2   loc 0     axes  fig2 add subplot 111  grid True  fig2 add subplot 111  set xticks arange 1 3 0 5   fig2 add subplot 111  axis xmin 3  xmax 6    there re also ymin  ymax fig2 add subplot 111  axis  0 4 3 6     all  fig2 add subplot 111  set xlim  0 4   fig2 add subplot 111  set ylim  3 6      labels  fig2 add subplot 111  set xlabel r x  2 2    fontsize 15  color    r   fig2 add subplot 111  set ylabel r y  2 2    fig2 add subplot 111  set title r title  6 4    fig2 add subplot 111  text 2  5 5  r an equation   E mc 2    fontsize 15  color    y   fig2 add subplot 111  text 3  2  unicode  f 374r    latin-1       saving  fig2 savefig  fig2 png     So - what exactly do You want to be configured

User · Answer

Check this  How to maximize a plt show   window using Python  The command is different depending on which backend you use  I find that this is the best way to make sure the saved pictures have the same scaling as what I view on my screen   Since I use Canopy with the QT backend   pylab get current fig manager   window showMaximized     I then call savefig   as required with an increased DPI per silvado s answer

User · Answer

You can look in a saved figure it s size  like 1920x983 px  size when i saved a maximized window   then I set the dpi as 100 and the size as 19 20x9 83 and it worked fine  Saved exactly equal to the maximized figure   import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt x  y   np genfromtxt  fname dat   usecols  0 1   unpack True  a   plt figure figsize  19 20 9 83   a   plt plot x  y   -   plt savefig  file png  format  png  dpi 100

User · Answer

There are two major options in matplotlib  pylab  to control the image size    You can set the size of the resulting image in inches  You can define the DPI  dots per inch  for output file  basically  it is a resolution    Normally  you would like to do both  because this way you will have full control over the resulting image size in pixels  For example  if you want to render exactly 800x600 image  you can use DPI 100  and set the size as 8 x 6 in inches   import matplotlib pyplot as plt   plot whatever you need      now  before saving to file  figure   plt gcf     get current figure figure set size inches 8  6    when saving  specify the DPI plt savefig  myplot png   dpi   100    One can use any DPI  In fact  you might want to play with various DPI and size values to get the result you like the most  Beware  however  that using very small DPI is not a good idea  because matplotlib may not find a good font to render legend and other text  For example  you cannot set the DPI 1  because there are no fonts with characters rendered with 1 pixel     From other comments I understood that other issue you have is proper text rendering  For this  you can also change the font size  For example  you may use 6 pixels per character  instead of 12 pixels per character used by default  effectively  making all text twice smaller    import matplotlib      matplotlib rc  font   size 6    Finally  some references to the original documentation  http   matplotlib sourceforge net api pyplot api html matplotlib pyplot savefig  http   matplotlib sourceforge net api pyplot api html matplotlib pyplot gcf  http   matplotlib sourceforge net api figure api html matplotlib figure Figure set size inches  http   matplotlib sourceforge net users customizing html dynamic-rc-settings   P S  Sorry  I didn t use pylab  but as far as I m aware  all the code above will work same way in pylab - just replace plt in my code with the pylab  or whatever name you assigned when importing pylab   Same for matplotlib - use pylab instead

User · Answer

If I understand correctly what you want to do  you can create your figure and set the size of the window  Afterwards  you can save your graph with the matplotlib toolbox button  Here an example   from pylab import get current fig manager show plt imshow  plt Figure   thismanager   get current fig manager   thismanager window wm geometry  500x500 0 0     in this case 500 is the size  in pixel  of the figure window  In your case you want to maximise to the size of your screen or whatever  imshow your data  show

User · Answer

I had this exact problem and this worked   plt savefig output dir     xyz png   bbox inches  tight     Here is the documentation    https   matplotlib org 3 1 1 api  as gen matplotlib pyplot savefig html  1

[python] How to make pylab.savefig() save image for 'maximized' window instead of default size

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