Reduce left and right margins in matplotlib plot

Question

I m struggling to deal with my plot margins in matplotlib  I ve used the code below to produce my chart   plt imshow g  c   plt colorbar   c set label  Number of Slabs   plt savefig  OutputToUse png     However  I get an output figure with lots of white space on either side of the plot  I ve searched google and read the matplotlib documentation  but I can t seem to find how to reduce this

User · Answer

plt savefig  circle png   bbox inches  tight  pad inches -1

User · Answer

All you need is  plt tight layout     before your output   In addition to cutting down the margins  this also tightly groups the space between any subplots   x    1 2 3  y    1 4 9  import matplotlib pyplot as plt fig   plt figure   subplot1   fig add subplot 121  subplot1 plot x y  subplot2   fig add subplot 122  subplot2 plot y x  fig tight layout   plt show

User · Answer

Just use ax   fig add axes  left  bottom  width  height    if you want exact control of the figure layout  eg   left   0 05 bottom   0 05 width   0 9 height   0 9 ax   fig add axes  left  bottom  width  height

User · Answer

The problem with matplotlibs subplots adjust is that the values you enter are relative to the x and y figsize of the figure  This example is for correct figuresizing for printing of a pdf   For that  I recalculate the relative spacing to absolute values like this   pyplot subplots adjust left    5 25 4  figure xsize  bottom    4 25 4  figure ysize  right   1 -  1 25 4  figure xsize  top   1 -  3 25 4  figure ysize    for a figure of  figure xsize  inches in x-dimension and  figure ysize  inches in y-dimension   So the whole figure has a left margin of 5 mm  bottom margin of 4 mm  right of 1 mm and top of 3 mm within the labels are placed  The conversion of  x 25 4  is done because I needed to convert mm to inches   Note that the pure chart size of x will be  figure xsize - left margin - right margin  and the pure chart size of y will be  figure ysize - bottom margin - top margin  in inches  Other sniplets  not sure about these ones  I just wanted to provide the other parameters   pyplot figure figsize   figureSize  dpi   None    and  pyplot savefig  outputname eps   dpi   100

User · Answer

One way to automatically do this is the bbox inches  tight  kwarg to plt savefig   E g   import matplotlib pyplot as plt import numpy as np data   np arange 3000  reshape  100 30   plt imshow data  plt savefig  test png   bbox inches  tight     Another way is to use fig tight layout    import matplotlib pyplot as plt import numpy as np  xs   np linspace 0  1  20   ys   np sin xs   fig   plt figure   axes   fig add subplot 1 1 1  axes plot xs  ys     This should be called after all axes have been added fig tight layout   fig savefig  test png

User · Answer

With recent matplotlib versions you might want to try Constrained Layout  Too bad pandas does not handle it well

User · Answer

You can adjust the spacing around matplotlib figures using the subplots adjust   function   import matplotlib pyplot as plt plt plot whatever  plt subplots adjust left 0 1  right 0 9  top 0 9  bottom 0 1    This will work for both the figure on screen and saved to a file  and it is the right function to call even if you don t have multiple plots on the one figure   The numbers are fractions of the figure dimensions  and will need to be adjusted to allow for the figure labels

User · Answer

For me  the answers above did not work with matplotlib   version     1 4 3 on Win7  So  if we are only interested in the image itself  i e   if we don t need annotations  axis  ticks  title  ylabel etc   then it s better to simply save the numpy array as image instead of savefig   from pylab import    ax   subplot 111  ax imshow some image numpyarray  imsave  test tif   some image numpyarray     or  if the image came from tiff or png etc RGBbuffer   ax get images   0  get array   imsave  test tif   RGBbuffer    Also  using opencv drawing functions  cv2 line  cv2 polylines   we can do some drawings directly on the numpy array  http   docs opencv org 2 4 modules core doc drawing functions html

User · Answer

In case anybody wonders how how to get rid of the rest of the white margin after applying plt tight layout   or fig tight layout    With the parameter pad  which is 1 08 by default   you re able to make it even tighter   Padding between the figure edge and the edges of subplots  as a fraction of the font size   So for example  plt tight layout pad 0 05    will reduce it to a very small margin  Putting 0 doesn t work for me  as it makes the box of the subplot be cut off a little  too

User · Answer

Sometimes  the plt tight layout   doesn t give me the best view or the view I want  Then why don t plot with arbitrary margin first and do fixing the margin after plot  Since we got nice WYSIWYG from there  import matplotlib pyplot as plt  fig ax   plt subplots figsize  8 8    plt plot  2 5 7 8 5 3 5 7    plt show     Then paste settings into margin function to make it permanent  fig ax   plt subplots figsize  8 8    plt plot  2 5 7 8 5 3 5 7    fig subplots adjust      top 0 981      bottom 0 049      left 0 042      right 0 981      hspace 0 2      wspace 0 2   plt show

User · Answer

inspired by Sammys answer above   margins            vvv margin in inches      left          1 5   figsize 0        bottom        0 8   figsize 1        right     1 - 0 3   figsize 0        top       1 - 1     figsize 1    fig subplots adjust   margins    Where figsize is the tuple that you used in fig   pyplot figure figsize

[python] Reduce left and right margins in matplotlib plot

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