Fine control over the font size in Seaborn plots for academic papers

Question

I m currently trying to use Seaborn to create plots for my academic papers  The plots look great and easy to generate  but one problem that I m having some trouble with is having the fine control on the font size in the plots    My font size in my paper is 9pt and I would like to make sure the font size in my plots are either 9pt or 10pt  But in seaborn  the font size is mainly controlled through font scale sns set context  paper   font scale 0 9   So it s hard for me to find the right font size except through trial and error  Is there a more efficient way to do this   I also want to make sure the font size is consistent between different seaborn plots  But not all my seaborn plots have the same dimension  so it seems like using the same font scale on all the plots does not necessarily create the same font size across these different plots   I ve attached my code below  I appreciate any comments on how to format the plot for a two column academic paper  My goal is to be able to control the size of the figure without distorting the font size or the plot  I use Latex to write my paper      Seaborn setting                                                                                                                                               sns set style  whitegrid   rc   grid linewidth   0 1   sns set context  paper   font scale 0 9                                                    plt figure figsize  3 1  3     Two column paper  Each column is about 3 15 inch wide                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   color   sns color palette  Set2   6     Create a box plot for my data                                                       splot   sns boxplot data df  palette color  whis np inf                                        width 0 5  linewidth   0 7     Labels and clean up on the plot                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               splot set ylabel  Normalized WS                                                        plt xticks rotation 90                                                                 plt tight layout                                                                       splot yaxis grid True  clip on False                                                   sns despine left True  bottom True                                                     plt savefig  test pdf   bbox inches  tight

User · Accepted Answer

You are right  This is a badly documented issue  But you can change the font size parameter  by opposition to font scale  directly after building the plot  Check the following example   import seaborn as sns tips   sns load dataset  tips    b   sns boxplot x tips  total bill    b axes set title  Title  fontsize 50  b set xlabel  X Label  fontsize 30  b set ylabel  Y Label  fontsize 20  b tick params labelsize 5  sns plt show       which results in this     To make it consistent in between plots I think you just need to make sure the DPI is the same  By the way it  also a possibility to customize a bit the rc dictionaries since  font size  parameter exists but I m not too sure how to do that   NOTE  And also I don t really understand why they changed the name of the font size variables for axis labels and ticks  Seems a bit un-intuitive

User · Answer

It is all but satisfying  isn t it  The easiest way I have found to specify when setting the context  e g   sns set context  quot paper quot   rc   quot font size quot  8  quot axes titlesize quot  8  quot axes labelsize quot  5       This should take care of 90  of standard plotting usage  If you want ticklabels smaller than axes labels  set the  axes labelsize  to the smaller  ticklabel  value and specify axis labels  or other custom elements  manually  e g   axs set ylabel  mylabel  size 6   you could define it as a function and load it in your scripts so you don t have to remember your standard numbers  or call it every time  def set pubfig      sns set context  quot paper quot   rc   quot font size quot  8  quot axes titlesize quot  8  quot axes labelsize quot  5       Of course you can use configuration files  but I guess the whole idea is to have a simple  straightforward method  which is why the above works well  Note  If you specify these numbers  specifying font scale in sns set context is ignored for all specified font elements  even if you set it

[python] Fine control over the font size in Seaborn plots for academic papers

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