How to add a clear border around a graph with matplotlib.pyplot

Question

I created a stacked barchart using matplotlib.pyplot but there is no border around the graph so the title of the graph and axes are right up against the edge of the image and get cutoff in some contexts when I use it. I would like to add a small clear or white border around the graph, axes and title. repos_amount is a pandas DataFrame.

Here is my code:

colors = ["Green", "Red","Blue"]
repos_amount[['Agency','MBS','Treasury']].plot.bar(stacked=True, color=colors, figsize=(15,7))
plt.title('Total Outstanding Fed Repos Operations', fontsize=16)
plt.ylabel('$ Billions', fontsize=12)

Here is what the graph looks like:

I tried the suggestions from the link below and I could not figure out how to make it work. I'm not good with matplotlib yet so I would need help figuring out how to apply it to my code. How to draw a frame on a matplotlib figure

This thread may help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45585183/how-to-draw-a-frame-on-a-matplotlib-figure/45587064 — Jack Hanson, Oct 24 '19 at 16:07
Possible duplicate of [How to draw a frame on a matplotlib figure](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45585183/how-to-draw-a-frame-on-a-matplotlib-figure) — Trenton McKinney, Oct 24 '19 at 21:29

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 25 '19 at 00:48

Try adding plt.tight_layout() to the bottom of your code.

Documentation indicates that this tries to fit the titles, labels etc within the subplot figure size, rather than adding items around this figure size.

It can have undesirable results if your labels or headings are too big, in which case you would then need to look into the answers in this thread to adjust the specific box size of your chart elements.

How to add a clear border around a graph with matplotlib.pyplot

1 Answers1