Saving Full Size Graph with Matplotlib without Locking the screen

Question

I've redacted information where necessary. But this question captures my problem:

Problem Statement:

My objective is simple: given graph data, graph it, and save it as a FULLSCREEN IMAGE automatically. (this needs to scale to a large number of graphs). I looked at: Saving Matplotlib graphs to image as full screen

And came up with the following solution:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#Prepare Data
some_x_array = [0, 1, 2]
other_x_array = [0, 1, 2]
some_y_array = [4, 5, 6]
other_y_array = [7, 8, 9] 

#Plot Data
plt.plot(some_x_array, some_y_array)
plt.plot(other_x_array, other_y_array)
plt.legend(['The X Axis', 'The Y Axis'])

#Maximize the Window

manager = plt.get_current_fig_manager()
manager.window.showMaximized()

#Acquire figure before the Image Loads
fig = plt.gcf()

#Show the Image (but don't block the flow)
plt.show(block=False)

#Save the image
fig.savefig('stackoverflowimage.png')

However anyone running this script will realize that the image it produces is not full-size. If you change the line plt.show(block=False) to plt.show(block=True), a graph appears, and once you close it, you will find a full size image.

I want to get a full size image, WITHOUT the graph appearing and demanding human interaction. What to do?

My Attempt at Solving the Problem:

It seems to me the command to make the screen full-size is executed lazily, i.e. I do already maximize the window in the code very early on, but until I show the thing, it never happens.

One Idea then is to try to do a show with a timer (ex: 0.001 seconds) but that feels like a very poor design choice.

ImportanceOfBeingErnest · Answer 1 · 2018-02-15T20:39:28.543

The solution you found will only work if the figure is shown in a window, because manager.window.showMaximized() sets the size of that window. It is actually not really clear what "fullscreen" would mean outside of some window management system. E.g. what is "fullscreen" on a server?

So if you have some idea of what size "fullscreen" should correspond to, you can set the figure size to that number.

For example I have a 1920 x 1080 pixels screen. In that case I can set the figure size to

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(19.2,10.8), dpi=100)

For finding out the screen size programmatically, see How do I get monitor resolution in Python? which has solutions for various systems.

E.g. using tkinter

import Tkinter as tk # use tkinter for python 3
root = tk.Tk()
width = root.winfo_screenwidth()
height = root.winfo_screenheight()

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#Prepare Data
x,y =   [0, 1, 2],[4, 5, 6]
x1,y1 = [0, 1, 2],[7, 8, 9] 

#Plot Data
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(width/100., height/100.), dpi=100)
plt.plot(x,y, label="label")
plt.legend()

#Save the image
fig.savefig('stackoverflowimage.png')

Saving Full Size Graph with Matplotlib without Locking the screen

Problem Statement:

My Attempt at Solving the Problem:

1 Answers1