Python - legend next to plot and in saved figure

Question

I have been searching across the forum but I have not been able to find the answer to my problem yet.

I want to create two pie charts next to each other, with a legend next to it.

labels = ['0-20', '20-40',  '40-60', '60-80', '80-100', '100-120']
colors = ['gold', 'yellowgreen', 'lightcoral', 'lightskyblue', 'orange', 'grey']

fig, [ax1, ax2] = plt.subplots(1,2)
ax1.pie(groen, colors = colors, startangle = 90, counterclock = False)
ax1.axis('equal')

ax2.pie(rood, colors = colors, startangle = 90, counterclock = False)
ax2.axis('equal')
plt.legend(labels, loc = 'best')#, bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, 0), mode = 'expand', ncol = 2)

I have been trying out quite some stuff, but unfortunately without results. What goes wrong is that the legend is not fully in the saved image, as can be seen below. I also got a white bar and the legend is in the wrong order. I want to read it from left to right, top to bottom.

Any help is welcome ;)

have you read about legend location : http://matplotlib.org/users/legend_guide.html ... ? — Dadep, Apr 06 '17 at 11:55
There is also a detailed answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43272206/python-legend-overlaps-with-the-pie-chart/43281595 — ImportanceOfBeingErnest, Apr 07 '17 at 15:27

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 06 '17 at 12:00

When using the following code

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
groen = rood = [7,8,12,4,9,5]
labels = ['0-20', '20-40',  '40-60', '60-80', '80-100', '100-120']
colors = ['gold', 'yellowgreen', 'lightcoral', 'lightskyblue', 'orange', 'grey']

fig, [ax1, ax2] = plt.subplots(1,2)
ax1.pie(groen, colors = colors, startangle = 90, counterclock = False)
ax1.axis('equal')

ax2.pie(rood, colors = colors, startangle = 90, counterclock = False)
ax2.axis('equal')
plt.legend(labels, loc = 8, ncol = 2)

plt.savefig(__file__+".png", bbox_inches="tight")
plt.show()

everthing works as expected, I guess. Note the bbox_inches="tight" argument, which shrinks or expands the figure size such that nothing is cropped.

Python - legend next to plot and in saved figure

1 Answers1