Stop X-axis Labels From Shrinking The Plot In Matplotlib?

I'm trying to make a bar graph with the following code: import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import seaborn as sns test = {'names':['a','b','abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw

Solution 1:

One workaround is to create the Axes instance yourself as axes, not as subplot. Then tight_layout() has no effect, even if it's called internally. You can then pass the Axes with the ax keyword to sns.barplot. The problem now is that if you call plt.show() the label may be cut off, but if you call savefig with bbox_inches='tight', the figure size will be extended to contain both the figure and all labels:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_axes([0,0,1,1])

test = {'names':['a','b','abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789012345678901234567890'], 'values':[1,2,3]}
df = pd.DataFrame(test)

#plt.rcParams['figure.autolayout'] = False
ax = sns.barplot(x='names', y='values', data=df, ax=ax)
ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=90)
#plt.show()
fig.savefig('long_label.png', bbox_inches='tight')

PROCLAIMER: I don't have pycharm, so there goes the assumption in this code, that matplotlib behaves the same with and without pycharm. Anyway, for me the outcome looks like this:

Solution 2:

If you want this in an interactive backend I didn't find any other way than manually adjust the figure size. This is what I get using the qt5agg backend:

ax = sns.barplot(x='names', y='values', data=df)
ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=90)
ax.figure.set_size_inches(5, 8)  # manually adjust figure size
plt.tight_layout()  # automatically adjust elements inside the figure
plt.show()

Note that pycharm's scientific mode might be doing some magic that prevents this to work so you might need to deactivate it or just run the script outside pycharm.