Matplotlib subplots adjust hspace so titles and xlabels don t overlap

Question

With  say  3 rows of subplots in matplotlib  xlabels of one row can overlap the title of the next   One has to fiddle with pl subplots adjust hspace   which is annoying     Is there a recipe for hspace that prevents overlaps and works for any nrow       matplotlib xlabels overlap titles       import sys import numpy as np import pylab as pl  nrow   3 hspace    4    of plot height  titles and xlabels both fall within this    exec   n  join  sys argv 1        nrow       y   np arange 10  pl subplots adjust  hspace hspace    for jrow in range  1  nrow 1        pl subplot  nrow  1  jrow       pl plot  y  jrow       pl title  5     title  d     jrow        pl xlabel  5     xlabel  d     jrow     pl show     My versions     matplotlib 0 99 1 1   Python 2 6 4   Mac OSX 10 4 11  backend  Qt4Agg   TkAgg    Exception in Tkinter callback     For many extra points  can anyone outline how matplotlib s packer   spacer works  along the lines of chapter 17  the packer  in the Tcl Tk book

User · Answer

You can use plt subplots adjust to change the spacing between the subplots Link  subplots adjust left None  bottom None  right None  top None  wspace None  hspace None   left    0 125    the left side of the subplots of the figure right   0 9      the right side of the subplots of the figure bottom   0 1     the bottom of the subplots of the figure top   0 9        the top of the subplots of the figure wspace   0 2     the amount of width reserved for blank space between subplots hspace   0 2     the amount of height reserved for white space between subplots

User · Answer

I find this quite tricky  but there is some information on it here at the MatPlotLib FAQ  It is rather cumbersome  and requires finding out about what space individual elements  ticklabels  take up     Update  The page states that the tight layout   function is the easiest way to go  which attempts to automatically correct spacing   Otherwise  it shows ways to acquire the sizes of various elements  eg  labels  so you can then correct the spacings positions of your axes elements   Here is an example from the above FAQ page  which determines the width of a very wide y-axis label  and adjusts the axis width accordingly   import matplotlib pyplot as plt import matplotlib transforms as mtransforms fig   plt figure   ax   fig add subplot 111  ax plot range 10   ax set yticks  2 5 7   labels   ax set yticklabels   really  really  really    long    labels     def on draw event      bboxes         for label in labels         bbox   label get window extent            the figure transform goes from relative coords- gt pixels and we          want the inverse of that        bboxi   bbox inverse transformed fig transFigure         bboxes append bboxi        this is the bbox that bounds all the bboxes  again in relative      figure coords    bbox   mtransforms Bbox union bboxes     if fig subplotpars left  lt  bbox width           we need to move it over        fig subplots adjust left 1 1 bbox width    pad a little        fig canvas draw      return False  fig canvas mpl connect  draw event   on draw   plt show

User · Answer

The link posted by Jose has been updated and pylab now has a tight layout   function that does this automatically  in matplotlib version 1 1 0    http   matplotlib org api pyplot api html matplotlib pyplot tight layout  http   matplotlib org users tight layout guide html plotting-guide-tight-layout

[python] Matplotlib subplots_adjust hspace so titles and xlabels don't overlap?

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