I am working on this plot:
Conceptually, would like to change x labels position from this:
to this:
Is there a function for that? Do I need to manually change the position of my label and if so how?
I don't want to use :
plt.margins(x=0.04)
because it shifts my data as well, and I need, just 2006 shifted right and just 2018 shifted left.
You do this by digging slightly deeper into the workings of matplotlib ticks using the object oriented API.
First off, you can get a list of your major ticks using xaxis.get_major_ticks(). This returns a list of matplotlib.axis.XTick objects. These have an attribute label1 which is the label of the tick. This is a Text instance which has a property set_horizontalalignment(align). Which states:
set_horizontalalignment(align)Set the horizontal alignment to one of
ACCEPTS: [ ‘center’ | ‘right’ | ‘left’ ]
Then, as you only want to modify the first and last ticks, simply set the alignment of the specific ticks using the first and last entries in the list.
A working example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = [1,2,3]
y = [4,5,6]
labels = ["2004", "2006", "2008"]
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.margins(0)
ax.plot(x,y)
ax.set_xticks(x)
ax.set_xticklabels(labels)
# above code recreates the issue
# get list of x tick objects
xTick_objects = ax.xaxis.get_major_ticks()
xTick_objects[0].label1.set_horizontalalignment('left') # left align first tick
xTick_objects[-1].label1.set_horizontalalignment('right') # right align last tick
plt.show()
Which gives:
You can use set_xlim() if you have just these 3 values.
X = [2006, 2012, 2018]
Y = [0, 15, 30]
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot(X, Y, color='r')
ax.set_xlim(2005, 2019)
plt.xticks([2006, 2012, 2018])
plt.yticks([0, 30])
plt.show()
