Why is my xlabel cut off in my matplotlib plot

Question

I am plotting a dataset using matplotlib where I have an xlabel that is quite  tall   it s a formula rendered in TeX that contains a fraction and is therefore has the height equivalent of a couple of lines of text    In any case  the bottom of the formula is always cut off when I draw the figures   Changing figure size doesn t seem to help this  and I haven t been able to figure out how to shift the x-axis  up  to make room for the xlabel   Something like that would be a reasonable temporary solution  but what would be nice would be to have a way to make matplotlib recognize automatically that the label is cut off and resize accordingly   Here s an example of what I mean   import matplotlib pyplot as plt  plt figure   plt ylabel r   ln left  frac x a-x b  x a-x c  right     plt xlabel r   ln left  frac x a-x d  x a-x e  right     plt show     while you can see the entire ylabel  the xlabel is cut off at the bottom    In the case this is a machine-specific problem  I am running this on OSX 10 6 8 with matplotlib 1 0 0

User · Answer

You can also set custom padding as defaults in your  HOME  matplotlib matplotlib rc as follows   In the example below I have modified both the bottom and left out-of-the-box padding     The figure subplot parameters   All dimensions are a fraction of the   figure width or height figure subplot left    0 1  left side of the subplots of the figure  figure subplot right   0 9  figure subplot bottom   0 15

User · Answer

An easy option is to configure matplotlib to automatically adjust the plot size  It works perfectly for me and I m not sure why it s not activated by default   Method 1  Set this in your matplotlibrc file  figure autolayout   True   See here for more information on customizing the matplotlibrc file  http   matplotlib org users customizing html  Method 2  Update the rcParams during runtime like this  from matplotlib import rcParams rcParams update   figure autolayout   True     The advantage of using this approach is that your code will produce the same graphs on differently-configured machines

User · Answer

Use   import matplotlib pyplot as plt  plt gcf   subplots adjust bottom 0 15    to make room for the label   Edit   Since i gave the answer  matplotlib has added the tight layout   function  So i suggest to use it   plt tight layout     should make room for the xlabel

User · Answer

Putting plot tight layout   after all changes on the graph  just before show   or savefig   will solve the problem

User · Answer

plt autoscale   worked for me

User · Answer

for some reason sharex was set to True so I turned it back to False and it worked fine  df plot          sharex False

User · Answer

In case you want to store it to a file  you solve it using bbox inches  tight  argument   plt savefig  myfile png   bbox inches    tight

[python] Why is my xlabel cut off in my matplotlib plot?

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