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How to position suptitle

I'm trying to adjust a suptitle above a multi-panel figure and am having trouble figuring out how to adjust the figsize and subsequently position the suptitle.
The problem is that calling plt.suptitle("my title", y=...) to adjust the position of the suptitle also adjusts the figure dimensions. A few questions:
where does suptitle(..., y=1.1) actually put the title? As far as I can tell, the documentation for the y parameter of suptitle points to matplotlib.text.Text, but I don't know what figure coordinates mean when you have multiple subplots.
what is the effect on figure size when specifying y to suptitle?
how do I manually adjust figure size and spacing (subplots_adjust?) to add a figure title per panel and a suptitle for the entire figure, maintaining the size of each ax in the figure?
An example:
data = np.random.random(size=100)
f, a = plt.subplots(2, 2, figsize=(10, 5))
a[0,0].plot(data)
a[0,0].set_title("this is a really long title\n"*2)
a[0,1].plot(data)
a[1,1].plot(data)
plt.suptitle("a big long suptitle that runs into the title\n"*2, y=1.05);
Obviously I can tweak y each time I make a figure, but I need a solution that generally works without manual intervention. I've tried both constrained layout and tight layout; neither works reliably with figures of any complexity.

1. What do figure coordinates mean?
Figure coordinates go 0 to 1, where (0,0) is the lower left corner and (1,1) is the upper right corner. A coordinate of y=1.05 is hence slightly outside the figure.
2. what is the effect on figure size when specifying y to suptitle?
Specifying y to suptitle has no effect whatsoever on the figure size.
3a. How do I manually adjust figure size and spacing to add a figure title per panel and a suptitle for the entire figure?
First, one would not add an additional linebreak. I.e. if you want to have 2 lines, don't use 3 linebreaks (\n). Then one can adjust the subplot parameters as desired to leave space for the titles. E.g. fig.subplots_adjust(top=0.8) and use a y <= 1 for the title to be inside the figure.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
data = np.random.random(size=100)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 2, figsize=(10, 5))
fig.subplots_adjust(top=0.8)
axes[0,0].plot(data)
axes[0,0].set_title("\n".join(["this is a really long title"]*2))
axes[0,1].plot(data)
axes[1,1].plot(data)
fig.suptitle("\n".join(["a big long suptitle that runs into the title"]*2), y=0.98)
plt.show()
3b. ... while maintaining the size of each ax in the figure?
Maintaining the size of the axes and still have enough space for the titles is only possible by changing the overall figure size.
This could look as follows, where we define a function make_space_above which takes the array of axes as input, as well as the newly desired top margin in units of inches. So for example, you come to the conclusion that you need 1 inch of margin on top to host your titles:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
data = np.random.random(size=100)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 2, figsize=(10, 5), squeeze = False)
axes[0,0].plot(data)
axes[0,0].set_title("\n".join(["this is a really long title"]*2))
axes[0,1].plot(data)
axes[1,1].plot(data)
fig.suptitle("\n".join(["a big long suptitle that runs into the title"]*2), y=0.98)
def make_space_above(axes, topmargin=1):
""" increase figure size to make topmargin (in inches) space for
titles, without changing the axes sizes"""
fig = axes.flatten()[0].figure
s = fig.subplotpars
w, h = fig.get_size_inches()
figh = h - (1-s.top)*h + topmargin
fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=s.bottom*h/figh, top=1-topmargin/figh)
fig.set_figheight(figh)
make_space_above(axes, topmargin=1)
plt.show()
(left: without calling make_space_above; right: with call to make_space_above(axes, topmargin=1))

Short Answer
For those coming from Google for adjusting the title position on a scatter matrix, you can simply set the y parameter to a value slightly lower than 1:
plt.suptitle('My Title', y=0.92)

... or use constrained_layout:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
data = np.random.random(size=100)
f, a = plt.subplots(2, 2, figsize=(10, 5), constrained_layout=True)
a[0,0].plot(data)
a[0,0].set_title("this is a really long title\n"*2)
a[0,1].plot(data)
a[1,1].plot(data)
plt.suptitle("a big long suptitle that runs into the title\n"*2);

A bit of a hacky solution, but if your plots only have 1 column, perhaps consider just add the main title to the title of the first plot, like so:
ax[0].set_title("Main Title\nFirst Plot")

How can I adjust Axes sizes in matplotlib polar plots? [duplicate]

I am starting to play around with creating polar plots in Matplotlib that do NOT encompass an entire circle - i.e. a "wedge" plot - by setting the thetamin and thetamax properties. This is something I was waiting for for a long time, and I am glad they have it done :)
However, I have noticed that the figure location inside the axes seem to change in a strange manner when using this feature; depending on the wedge angular aperture, it can be difficult to fine tune the figure so it looks nice.
Here's an example:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# get 4 polar axes in a row
fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 2, subplot_kw={'projection': 'polar'},
figsize=(8, 8))
# set facecolor to better display the boundaries
# (as suggested by ImportanceOfBeingErnest)
fig.set_facecolor('paleturquoise')
for i, theta_max in enumerate([2*np.pi, np.pi, 2*np.pi/3, np.pi/3]):
# define theta vector with varying end point and some data to plot
theta = np.linspace(0, theta_max, 181)
data = (1/6)*np.abs(np.sin(3*theta)/np.sin(theta/2))
# set 'thetamin' and 'thetamax' according to data
axes[i//2, i%2].set_thetamin(0)
axes[i//2, i%2].set_thetamax(theta_max*180/np.pi)
# actually plot the data, fine tune radius limits and add labels
axes[i//2, i%2].plot(theta, data)
axes[i//2, i%2].set_ylim([0, 1])
axes[i//2, i%2].set_xlabel('Magnitude', fontsize=15)
axes[i//2, i%2].set_ylabel('Angles', fontsize=15)
fig.set_tight_layout(True)
#fig.savefig('fig.png', facecolor='skyblue')
The labels are in awkward locations and over the tick labels, but can be moved closer or further away from the axes by adding an extra labelpad parameter to set_xlabel, set_ylabel commands, so it's not a big issue.
Unfortunately, I have the impression that the plot is adjusted to fit inside the existing axes dimensions, which in turn lead to a very awkward white space above and below the half circle plot (which of course is the one I need to use).
It sounds like something that should be reasonably easy to get rid of - I mean, the wedge plots are doing it automatically - but I can't seem to figure it out how to do it for the half circle. Can anyone shed a light on this?
EDIT: Apologies, my question was not very clear; I want to create a half circle polar plot, but it seems that using set_thetamin() you end up with large amounts of white space around the image (especially above and below) which I would rather have removed, if possible.
It's the kind of stuff that normally tight_layout() takes care of, but it doesn't seem to be doing the trick here. I tried manually changing the figure window size after plotting, but the white space simply scales with the changes. Below is a minimum working example; I can get the xlabel closer to the image if I want to, but saved image file still contains tons of white space around it.
Does anyone knows how to remove this white space?
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# get a half circle polar plot
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots(1, 1, subplot_kw={'projection': 'polar'})
# set facecolor to better display the boundaries
# (as suggested by ImportanceOfBeingErnest)
fig1.set_facecolor('skyblue')
theta_min = 0
theta_max = np.pi
theta = np.linspace(theta_min, theta_max, 181)
data = (1/6)*np.abs(np.sin(3*theta)/np.sin(theta/2))
# set 'thetamin' and 'thetamax' according to data
ax1.set_thetamin(0)
ax1.set_thetamax(theta_max*180/np.pi)
# actually plot the data, fine tune radius limits and add labels
ax1.plot(theta, data)
ax1.set_ylim([0, 1])
ax1.set_xlabel('Magnitude', fontsize=15)
ax1.set_ylabel('Angles', fontsize=15)
fig1.set_tight_layout(True)
#fig1.savefig('fig1.png', facecolor='skyblue')
EDIT 2: Added background color to figures to better show the boundaries, as suggested in ImportanteOfBeingErnest's answer.

It seems the wedge of the "truncated" polar axes is placed such that it sits in the middle of the original axes. There seems so be some constructs called LockedBBox and _WedgeBbox in the game, which I have never seen before and do not fully understand. Those seem to be created at draw time, such that manipulating them from the outside seems somewhere between hard and impossible.
One hack can be to manipulate the original axes such that the resulting wedge turns up at the desired position. This is not really deterministic, but rather looking for some good values by trial and error.
The parameters to adjust in this case are the figure size (figsize), the padding of the labels (labelpad, as already pointed out in the question) and finally the axes' position (ax.set_position([left, bottom, width, height])).
The result could then look like
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# get a half circle polar plot
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots(1, 1, figsize=(6,3.4), subplot_kw={'projection': 'polar'})
theta_min = 1.e-9
theta_max = np.pi
theta = np.linspace(theta_min, theta_max, 181)
data = (1/6.)*np.abs(np.sin(3*theta)/np.sin(theta/2.))
# set 'thetamin' and 'thetamax' according to data
ax1.set_thetamin(0)
ax1.set_thetamax(theta_max*180./np.pi)
# actually plot the data, fine tune radius limits and add labels
ax1.plot(theta, data)
ax1.set_ylim([0, 1])
ax1.set_xlabel('Magnitude', fontsize=15, labelpad=-60)
ax1.set_ylabel('Angles', fontsize=15)
ax1.set_position( [0.1, -0.45, 0.8, 2])
plt.show()
Here I've set some color to the background of the figure to better see the boundary.

Setting both axes logarithmic in bar plot matploblib

I have already binned data to plot a histogram. For this reason I'm using the plt.bar() function. I'd like to set both axes in the plot to a logarithmic scale.
If I set plt.bar(x, y, width=10, color='b', log=True) which lets me set the y-axis to log but I can't set the x-axis logarithmic.
I've tried plt.xscale('log') unfortunately this doesn't work right. The x-axis ticks vanish and the sizes of the bars don't have equal width.
I would be grateful for any help.

By default, the bars of a barplot have a width of 0.8. Therefore they appear larger for smaller x values on a logarithmic scale. If instead of specifying a constant width, one uses the distance between the bin edges and supplies this to the width argument, the bars will have the correct width. One would also need to set the align to "edge" for this to work.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(1)
x = np.logspace(0, 5, num=21)
y = (np.sin(1.e-2*(x[:-1]-20))+3)**10
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.bar(x[:-1], y, width=np.diff(x), log=True,ec="k", align="edge")
ax.set_xscale("log")
plt.show()
I cannot reproduce missing ticklabels for a logarithmic scaling. This may be due to some settings in the code that are not shown in the question or due to the fact that an older matplotlib version is used. The example here works fine with matplotlib 2.0.

If the goal is to have equal width bars, assuming datapoints are not equidistant, then the most proper solution is to set width as
plt.bar(x, y, width=c*np.array(x), color='b', log=True) for a constant c appropriate for the plot. Alignment can be anything.

I know it is a very old question and you might have solved it but I've come to this post because I was with something like this but at the y axis and I manage to solve it just using ax.set_ylim(df['my data'].min()+100, df['my data'].max()+100). In y axis I have some sensible information which I thouhg the best way was to show in log scale but when I set log scale I couldn't see the numbers proper (as this post in x axis) so I just leave the idea of use log and use the min and max argment. It sets the scale of my graph much like as log. Still looking for another way for doesnt need use that -+100 at set_ylim.

While this does not actually use pyplot.bar, I think this method could be helpful in achieving what the OP is trying to do. I found this to be easier than trying to calibrate the width as a function of the log-scale, though it's more steps. Create a line collection whose width is independent of the chart scale.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.collections as coll
#Generate data and sort into bins
a = np.random.logseries(0.5, 1000)
hist, bin_edges = np.histogram(a, bins=20, density=False)
x = bin_edges[:-1] # remove the top-end from bin_edges to match dimensions of hist
lines = []
for i in range(len(x)):
pair=[(x[i],0), (x[i], hist[i])]
lines.append(pair)
linecoll = coll.LineCollection(lines, linewidths=10, linestyles='solid')
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.add_collection(linecoll)
ax.set_xscale("log")
ax.set_yscale("log")
ax.set_xlim(min(x)/10,max(x)*10)
ax.set_ylim(0.1,1.1*max(hist)) #since this is an unweighted histogram, the logy doesn't make much sense.
Resulting plot - no frills
One drawback is that the "bars" will be centered, but this could be changed by offsetting the x-values by half of the linewidth value ... I think it would be
x_new = x + (linewidth/2)*10**round(np.log10(x),0).

Subplots: tight_layout changes figure size

Changing the vertical distance between two subplot using tight_layout(h_pad=-1) changes the total figuresize. How can I define the figuresize using tight_layout?
Here is the code:
#define figure
pl.figure(figsize=(10, 6.25))
ax1=subplot(211)
img=pl.imshow(np.random.random((10,50)), interpolation='none')
ax1.set_xticklabels(()) #hides the tickslabels of the first plot
subplot(212)
x=linspace(0,50)
pl.plot(x,x,'k-')
xlim( ax1.get_xlim() ) #same x-axis for both plots
And here is the results:
If I write
pl.tight_layout(h_pad=-2)
in the last line, then I get this:
As you can see, the figure is bigger...

You can use a GridSpec object to control precisely width and height ratios, as answered on this thread and documented here.
Experimenting with your code, I could produce something like what you want, by using a height_ratio that assigns twice the space to the upper subplot, and increasing the h_pad parameter to the tight_layout call. This does not sound completely right, but maybe you can adjust this further ...
import numpy as np
from matplotlib.pyplot import *
import matplotlib.pyplot as pl
import matplotlib.gridspec as gridspec
#define figure
fig = pl.figure(figsize=(10, 6.25))
gs = gridspec.GridSpec(2, 1, height_ratios=[2,1])
ax1=subplot(gs[0])
img=pl.imshow(np.random.random((10,50)), interpolation='none')
ax1.set_xticklabels(()) #hides the tickslabels of the first plot
ax2=subplot(gs[1])
x=np.linspace(0,50)
ax2.plot(x,x,'k-')
xlim( ax1.get_xlim() ) #same x-axis for both plots
fig.tight_layout(h_pad=-5)
show()
There were other issues, like correcting the imports, adding numpy, and plotting to ax2 instead of directly with pl. The output I see is this:

This case is peculiar because of the fact that the default aspect ratios of images and plots are not the same. So it is worth noting for people looking to remove the spaces in a grid of subplots consisting of images only or of plots only that you may find an appropriate solution among the answers to this question (and those linked to it): How to remove the space between subplots in matplotlib.pyplot?.
The aspect ratios of the subplots in this particular example are as follows:
# Default aspect ratio of images:
ax1.get_aspect()
# 1.0
# Which is as it is expected based on the default settings in rcParams file:
matplotlib.rcParams['image.aspect']
# 'equal'
# Default aspect ratio of plots:
ax2.get_aspect()
# 'auto'
The size of ax1 and the space beneath it are adjusted automatically based on the number of pixels along the x-axis (i.e. width) so as to preserve the 'equal' aspect ratio while fitting both subplots within the figure. As you mentioned, using fig.tight_layout(h_pad=xxx) or the similar fig.set_constrained_layout_pads(hspace=xxx) is not a good option as this makes the figure larger.
To remove the gap while preserving the original figure size, you can use fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=xxx) or the equivalent plt.subplots(gridspec_kw=dict(hspace=xxx)), as shown in the following example:
import numpy as np # v 1.19.2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # v 3.3.2
np.random.seed(1)
fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(10, 6.25),
gridspec_kw=dict(hspace=-0.206))
# For those not using plt.subplots, you can use this instead:
# fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=-0.206)
size = 50
ax1.imshow(np.random.random((10, size)))
ax1.xaxis.set_visible(False)
# Create plot of a line that is aligned with the image above
x = np.arange(0, size)
ax2.plot(x, x, 'k-')
ax2.set_xlim(ax1.get_xlim())
plt.show()
I am not aware of any way to define the appropriate hspace automatically so that the gap can be removed for any image width. As stated in the docstring for fig.subplots_adjust(), it corresponds to the height of the padding between subplots, as a fraction of the average axes height. So I attempted to compute hspace by dividing the gap between the subplots by the average height of both subplots like this:
# Extract axes positions in figure coordinates
ax1_x0, ax1_y0, ax1_x1, ax1_y1 = np.ravel(ax1.get_position())
ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1 = np.ravel(ax2.get_position())
# Compute negative hspace to close the vertical gap between subplots
ax1_h = ax1_y1-ax1_y0
ax2_h = ax2_y1-ax2_y0
avg_h = (ax1_h+ax2_h)/2
gap = ax1_y0-ax2_y1
hspace=-(gap/avg_h) # this divided by 2 also does not work
fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=hspace)
Unfortunately, this does not work. Maybe someone else has a solution for this.
It is also worth mentioning that I tried removing the gap between subplots by editing the y positions like in this example:
# Extract axes positions in figure coordinates
ax1_x0, ax1_y0, ax1_x1, ax1_y1 = np.ravel(ax1.get_position())
ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1 = np.ravel(ax2.get_position())
# Set new y positions: shift ax1 down over gap
gap = ax1_y0-ax2_y1
ax1.set_position([ax1_x0, ax1_y0-gap, ax1_x1, ax1_y1-gap])
ax2.set_position([ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1])
Unfortunately, this (and variations of this) produces seemingly unpredictable results, including a figure resizing similar to when using fig.tight_layout(). Maybe someone else has an explanation for what is happening here behind the scenes.

Plotting point on top of filled contour plot adds lots of blank space

I have the following Python code which I am using to plot a filled contour plot:
def plot_polar_contour(values, azimuths, zeniths):
theta = np.radians(azimuths)
zeniths = np.array(zeniths)
values = np.array(values)
values = values.reshape(len(azimuths), len(zeniths))
r, theta = np.meshgrid(zeniths, np.radians(azimuths))
fig, ax = subplots(subplot_kw=dict(projection='polar'))
ax.set_theta_zero_location("N")
ax.set_theta_direction(-1)
cax = ax.contourf(theta, r, values, 30)
autumn()
cb = fig.colorbar(cax)
cb.set_label("Pixel reflectance")
show()
This gives me a plot like:
However, when I add the line ax.plot(0, 30, 'p') just before show() I get the following:
It seems that just adding that one point (which is well within the original axis range) screws up the axis range on the radius axis.
Is this by design, or is this a bug? What would you suggest doing to fix it? Do I need to manually adjust the axis ranges, or is there a way to stop the extra plot command doing this?

If the axis auto-scaling mode isn't explicitly specified, plot will use "loose" autoscaling and contourf will use "tight" autoscaling.
The same things happens for non-polar axes. E.g.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
plt.imshow(np.random.random((10,10)))
plt.plot([7], [7], 'ro')
plt.show()
You have a number of options.
Explicitly call ax.axis('image') or ax.axis('tight') at some point in the code.
Pass in scalex=False and scaley=False as keyword arguments to plot.
Manually set the axis limits.
The easiest and most readable is to just explicitly call ax.axis('tight'), i.m.o.