Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

Setting the margin with plt.tight_layout()

Next, we can adjust the alignment. We may want to adjust the margin between each subplot, or leave no margin instead of having rows and columns of discrete boxes. In this case, we can use the plt.tight_layout() function. By default, it fits all subplots into the figure area when no parameters are supplied. It takes the keyword arguments pad, w_pad, and h_pad to control the padding around subplots. Let's look at the following code example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as pltfig, axarr = plt.subplots(3,4,sharex=True,sharey=True)for i in range(3):    for j in range(4):        axarr[i][j].text(0.3,0.5,str(i)+','+str(j),fontsize=18)plt.tight_layout(pad=0, w_pad=-1.6, h_pad=-1)

We see from the following figure that ...