Shifting all label values far from axis

Question

I have created a surface plot but problem is that my tick label and axis label overlap each other. Is there any way to shift the label in all axis far from tick labels? I actually need to keep the tick label font bigger so making that smaller is not an ideal for my case.

Answer 1

Several ways you can set this

For all axes with rcParams using

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['axes.labelpad'] = 20.0

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Individually (for an axis handle) with

ax.xaxis.labelpad = 20
ax.yaxis.labelpad = 20
ax.zaxis.labelpad = 20

if you do not have an axis you can precede this with

ax = plt.gca()

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When you create the labels

plt.xlabel("X Label", labelpad=20)
plt.ylabel("Y Label", labelpad=20)
plt.zlabel("Z Label", labelpad=20)

or for an axis handle

ax.set_xlabel("X Label", labelpad=20)
ax.set_ylabel("Y Label", labelpad=20)
ax.set_zlabel("Z Label", labelpad=20)

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Here is a complete example using some randomly generated data

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['axes.labelpad'] = 20.0

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(14,9))
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')

XS = np.random.randn(100)
YS = np.random.randn(100)
ZS = np.random.randn(100)

ax.scatter(XS, YS, ZS, c='r', marker='o')
plt.title("3D Scatterplot")
ax.set_xlabel('X Label')
ax.set_ylabel('Y Label')
ax.set_zlabel('Z Label')
plt.show()