Putting text in top left corner of matplotlib plot

Question

How can I put text in the top left  or top right  corner of a matplotlib figure  e g  where a top left legend would be  or on top of the plot but in the top left corner   E g  if it s a plt scatter    then something that would be within the square of the scatter  put in the top left most corner   I d like to do this without ideally knowing the scale of the scatterplot being plotted for example  since it will change from dataset to data set   I just want it the text to be roughly in the upper left  or roughly in the upper right  With legend type positioning it should not overlap with any scatter plot points anyway   thanks

User · Answer

One solution would be to use the plt legend function  even if you don t want an actual legend   You can specify the placement of the legend box by using the loc keyterm   More information can be found at this website but I ve also included an example showing how to place a legend   ax scatter xa ya  marker  o   s 20  c  lightgreen   alpha 0 9  ax scatter xb yb  marker  o   s 20  c  dodgerblue   alpha 0 9  ax scatter xc yc marker  o   s 20  c  firebrick   alpha 1 0  ax scatter xd xd xd  marker  o   s 20  c  goldenrod   alpha 0 9  line1   Line2D range 10   range 10   marker  o   color  goldenrod   line2   Line2D range 10   range 10   marker  o  color  firebrick   line3   Line2D range 10   range 10   marker  o  color  lightgreen   line4   Line2D range 10   range 10   marker  o  color  dodgerblue   plt legend  line1 line2 line3  line4    line1   line2    line3    line4   numpoints 1  loc 2     Note that because loc 2  the legend is in the upper-left corner of the plot   And if the text overlaps with the plot  you can make it smaller by using legend fontsize  which will then make the legend smaller

User · Answer

matplotlib is somewhat different from when the original answer was posted matplotlib pyplot text matplotlib axes Axes text  import matplotlib pyplot as plt  plt figure figsize  6  6   plt text 0 1  0 9   text   size 15  color  purple      or   fig  axe   plt subplots figsize  6  6   axe text 0 1  0 9   text   size 15  color  purple    Output of Both   From matplotlib  Precise text layout  You can precisely layout text in data or axes coordinates     import matplotlib pyplot as plt    Build a rectangle in axes coords left  width    25   5 bottom  height    25   5 right   left   width top   bottom   height ax   plt gca   p   plt Rectangle  left  bottom   width  height  fill False  p set transform ax transAxes  p set clip on False  ax add patch p    ax text left  bottom   left top           horizontalalignment  left           verticalalignment  top           transform ax transAxes   ax text left  bottom   left bottom           horizontalalignment  left           verticalalignment  bottom           transform ax transAxes   ax text right  top   right bottom           horizontalalignment  right           verticalalignment  bottom           transform ax transAxes   ax text right  top   right top           horizontalalignment  right           verticalalignment  top           transform ax transAxes   ax text right  bottom   center top           horizontalalignment  center           verticalalignment  top           transform ax transAxes   ax text left  0 5    bottom   top    right center           horizontalalignment  right           verticalalignment  center           rotation  vertical           transform ax transAxes   ax text left  0 5    bottom   top    left center           horizontalalignment  left           verticalalignment  center           rotation  vertical           transform ax transAxes   ax text 0 5    left   right   0 5    bottom   top    middle           horizontalalignment  center           verticalalignment  center           transform ax transAxes   ax text right  0 5    bottom   top    centered           horizontalalignment  center           verticalalignment  center           rotation  vertical           transform ax transAxes   ax text left  top   rotated nwith newlines           horizontalalignment  center           verticalalignment  center           rotation 45          transform ax transAxes   plt axis  off    plt show

User · Answer

You can use text    text x  y  s  fontsize 12    text coordinates can be given relative to the axis  so the position of your text will be independent of the size of the plot      The default transform specifies that text is in data coords    alternatively  you can specify text in axis coords  0 0 is lower-left   and 1 1 is upper-right    The example below places text in the center   of the axes     text 0 5  0 5  matplotlib        horizontalalignment  center        verticalalignment  center        transform   ax transAxes    To prevent the text to interfere with any point of your scatter is more difficult afaik  The easier method is to set y axis  ymax in ylim  ymin ymax    to a value a bit higher than the max y-coordinate of your points  In this way you will always have this free space for the text   EDIT  here you have an example   In  17   from pylab import figure  text  scatter  show In  18   f   figure   In  19   ax   f add subplot 111  In  20   scatter  3 5 2 6 8   5 3 2 1 5   Out 20    lt matplotlib collections CircleCollection object at 0x0000000007439A90 gt  In  21   text 0 1  0 9  matplotlib   ha  center   va  center   transform ax transAxes  Out 21    lt matplotlib text Text object at 0x0000000007415B38 gt  In  22       The ha and va parameters set the alignment of your text relative to the insertion point  ie  ha  left  is a good set to prevent a long text to go out of the left axis when the frame is reduced  made narrower  manually

[python] Putting text in top left corner of matplotlib plot

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