Figure area size questions

My apologies for two totally noob questions, but I can't quite seem to find these in the docs; a pointer would be great...

1. I would like to position a legend outside of the main plot area. The positioning part works great, but the legend is clipped to the pre-existing figure dimensions; how can I expand the figure size horizontally to allow for the legend? (And is there any way of auto-sizing the figure to include all of the stuff within it?)

2. In the horizontal bar chart I previously mentioned, the labels on the ticks on the Y-axis are clipped on the left side, as they are too long to fit into the pre-existing space. What's the best way of allowing more space for the tick labels, either by contracting the chart itself or expanding the figure?

Thanks in advance,

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-- Christophe Pettus
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My apologies for two totally noob questions, but I can’t quite seem to find these in the docs; a pointer would be great…

No problem. That is what we are here for.

  1. I would like to position a legend outside of the main plot area. The positioning part works great, but the legend is clipped to the pre-existing figure dimensions; how can I expand the figure size horizontally to allow for the legend? (And is there any way of auto-sizing the figure to include all of the stuff within it?)

This is actually something I deal with regularly. I haven’t found a good solution for the interactive viewing, but when saving a figure to an image file, you can do something like this (assume that the legend object is stored in a variable named “leg”):

fig.savefig('foobar.png", bbox_inches=‘tight’, pad_inches=0.25, bbox_extra_artists=[leg])

  1. In the horizontal bar chart I previously mentioned, the labels on the ticks on the Y-axis are clipped on the left side, as they are too long to fit into the pre-existing space. What’s the best way of allowing more space for the tick labels, either by contracting the chart itself or expanding the figure?

In mpl v1.1.0, we introduced a function called “tight_layout” which should help with such things. Admittedly, it would be nice if tight_layout did something similar to bbox_inches=‘tight’ and accept a list of additional artist objects to consider, but it does not do that right now.

Cheers!
Ben Root

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On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Christophe Pettus <xof@…83…3912…> wrote:

fig.savefig('foobar.png", bbox_inches='tight', pad_inches=0.25, bbox_extra_artists=[leg])

[...]

In mpl v1.1.0, we introduced a function called "tight_layout" which should help with such things. Admittedly, it would be nice if tight_layout did something similar to bbox_inches='tight' and accept a list of additional artist objects to consider, but it does not do that right now.

Both of those worked wonderfully... thanks very much!

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On Jan 12, 2012, at 10:18 AM, Benjamin Root wrote:

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-- Christophe Pettus
   xof@...3912...