Matplotlib margins in a plot

Question

Ok, I have exhausted all my google searches and have reached a point of I have no idea how to do that. It seems so simple, still, i have tried like 20 approaches and nothing works. I need help...

Using the following code i get this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams['axes.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"
plt.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"

plt.figure(figsize = (6,3))

plt.plot([1,3,2])

plt.show()

Image that i get

I would like to have something like this, with ample margins left and right. Would be also nice to have a simmilar aproach for top and bottom.

Image that i want

I have played around with tight_layout() and many other settings but I'm failing miserably to make it work.

An ugly hack would be to include:

plt.text(1.1, 1.1, "text", fontsize=14, transform=plt.gcf().transFigure)
plt.text(-.1, -.1, "text", fontsize=14, transform=plt.gcf().transFigure)

And then to make the text the same color as the background But of course i would like to have a more elegant way to do it

The idea is that a plot with some margins left and right looks more relaxed to the eye. Of course, I can fix this in other software but I would like to have it ready in plt.

Example image

Answer 1

You can specify the left and right margin in the gridspec:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams['axes.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"
plt.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize = (6,3), gridspec_kw={'left': .2, 'right': .8})

ax.plot([1,3,2])
plt.show() 

If you want to apply tight_layout, you can simply specify the box where to put the plot:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams['axes.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"
plt.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = "#F3F0E0"

plt.figure(figsize = (6,3))

plt.plot([1,3,2])

plt.tight_layout(rect=(.2, 0, .8, 1))

plt.show()

---

If you're using the IPyhton inline backend, add the following line at the beginning of your notebook to see the effect:

%config InlineBackend.print_figure_kwargs = {'bbox_inches': None}