Matplotlib tight layout doesn t take into account figure suptitle

Question

If I add a subtitle to my matplotlib figure it gets overlaid by the subplot s titles  Does anybody know how to easily take care of that  I tried the tight layout   function  but it only makes things worse   Example   import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt  f   np random random 100  g   np random random 100  fig   plt figure   fig suptitle  Long Suptitle   fontsize 24  plt subplot 121  plt plot f  plt title  Very Long Title 1   fontsize 20  plt subplot 122  plt plot g  plt title  Very Long Title 2   fontsize 20  plt tight layout   plt show

User · Answer

You could manually adjust the spacing using plt subplots adjust top 0 85    import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt  f   np random random 100  g   np random random 100  fig   plt figure   fig suptitle  Long Suptitle   fontsize 24  plt subplot 121  plt plot f  plt title  Very Long Title 1   fontsize 20  plt subplot 122  plt plot g  plt title  Very Long Title 2   fontsize 20  plt subplots adjust top 0 85  plt show

User · Answer

An alternative and simple to use solution is to adjust the coordinates of the suptitle text in the figure using the y argument in the call of suptitle  see the docs    import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt  f   np random random 100  g   np random random 100  fig   plt figure   fig suptitle  Long Suptitle   y 1 05  fontsize 24  plt subplot 121  plt plot f  plt title  Very Long Title 1   fontsize 20  plt subplot 122  plt plot g  plt title  Very Long Title 2   fontsize 20  plt show

User · Answer

The only thing that worked for me was modifying the call to suptitle   fig suptitle  title   y  995

User · Answer

This website has a simple solution to this with an example that worked for me  The line of code that does the actual leaving of space for the title is the following  plt tight layout rect  0  0  1  0 95     Here is an image of proof that it worked for me

User · Answer

I have struggled with the matplotlib trimming methods  so I ve now just made a function to do this via a bash call to ImageMagick s mogrify command  which works well and gets all extra white space off the figure s edge  This requires that you are using UNIX Linux  are using the bash shell  and have ImageMagick installed   Just throw a call to this after your savefig   call   def autocrop img filename          Call ImageMagick mogrify from bash to autocrop image        import subprocess     import os      cwd  img name   os path split filename       bashcmd    mogrify -trim  s    img name     process   subprocess Popen bashcmd split    stdout subprocess PIPE  cwd cwd

User · Answer

You can adjust the subplot geometry in the very tight layout call as follows   fig tight layout rect  0  0 03  1  0 95     As it s stated in the documentation  https   matplotlib org users tight layout guide html       tight layout   only considers ticklabels  axis labels  and titles  Thus  other artists may be clipped and also may overlap

User · Answer

I had a similar issue that cropped up when using tight layout for a very large grid of plots  more than 200 subplots  and rendering in a jupyter notebook   I made a quick solution that always places your suptitle at a certain distance above your top subplot   import matplotlib pyplot as plt  n rows   50 n col   4 fig  axs   plt subplots n rows  n cols    make plots        define y position of suptitle to be  20  of a row above the top row y title pos   axs 0  0  get position   get points   1  1   1 n rows  0 2 fig suptitle  My Sup Title   y y title pos    For variably-sized subplots  you can still use this method to get the top of the topmost subplot  then manually define an additional amount to add to the suptitle

User · Answer

One thing you could change in your code very easily is the fontsize you are using for the titles  However  I am going to assume that you don t just want to do that   Some alternatives to using fig subplots adjust top 0 85    Usually tight layout   does a pretty good job at positioning everything in good locations so that they don t overlap  The reason tight layout   doesn t help in this case is because tight layout   does not take fig suptitle   into account  There is an open issue about this on GitHub  https   github com matplotlib matplotlib issues 829  closed in 2014 due to requiring a full geometry manager - shifted to https   github com matplotlib matplotlib issues 1109     If you read the thread  there is a solution to your problem involving GridSpec  The key is to leave some space at the top of the figure when calling tight layout  using the rect kwarg  For your problem  the code becomes   Using GridSpec   import numpy as np import matplotlib pyplot as plt import matplotlib gridspec as gridspec  f   np random random 100  g   np random random 100   fig   plt figure 1  gs1   gridspec GridSpec 1  2  ax list    fig add subplot ss  for ss in gs1   ax list 0  plot f  ax list 0  set title  Very Long Title 1   fontsize 20   ax list 1  plot g  ax list 1  set title  Very Long Title 2   fontsize 20   fig suptitle  Long Suptitle   fontsize 24       gs1 tight layout fig  rect  0  0 03  1  0 95      plt show     The result     Maybe GridSpec is a bit overkill for you  or your real problem will involve many more subplots on a much larger canvas  or other complications  A simple hack is to just use annotate   and lock the coordinates to the  figure fraction  to imitate a suptitle  You may need to make some finer adjustments once you take a look at the output  though  Note that this second solution does not use tight layout     Simpler solution  though may need to be fine-tuned   fig   plt figure 2   ax1   plt subplot 121  ax1 plot f  ax1 set title  Very Long Title 1   fontsize 20   ax2   plt subplot 122  ax2 plot g  ax2 set title  Very Long Title 2   fontsize 20     fig suptitle  Long Suptitle   fontsize 24    Instead  do a hack by annotating the first axes with the desired    string and set the positioning to  figure fraction   fig get axes   0  annotate  Long Suptitle    0 5  0 95                                xycoords  figure fraction   ha  center                                fontsize 24                               plt show     The result      Using Python 2 7 3  64-bit  and matplotlib 1 2 0

User · Answer

As mentioned by others  by default the tight layout does not take suptitle into account  However  I have found it is possible to use the bbox extra artists argument to pass in the suptitle as a bounding box that should be taken into account    st   fig suptitle  My Super Title   plt savefig  figure png   bbox extra artists  st   bbox inches  tight     This forces the tight layout calculation to take the suptitle into account  and it looks as you would expect

User · Answer

Tight layout doesn t work with suptitle  but constrained layout does  See this question Improve subplot size spacing with many subplots in matplotlib  I found adding the subplots at once looked better  i e    fig  axs   plt subplots rows  cols  constrained layout True     then iterating over the axes to fill in the plots   But it can also be added at the point the figure is created   fig   plt figure constrained layout True   ax1   fig add subplot cols  rows  1    etc   Note  To make my subplots closer together  I was also using   fig subplots adjust wspace 0 05    and constrained layout doesn t work with this

[python] Matplotlib tight_layout() doesn't take into account figure suptitle

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