What can I do about the overlapping labels in these subplots?

Question

Below is a figure I created with matplotlib. The problem is pretty obvious -- the labels overlap and the whole thing is an unreadable mess. I tried calling `tight_layout` for each subplot, but this crashes my ipython-notebook kernel. What can I do to fix the layout? Acceptable approaches include fixing the xlabel, ylabel, and title for each subplot, but another (and perhaps better) approach would be to have a single xlabel, ylabel and title for the entire figure. Here's the loop I used to generate the above subplots: ``` for i, sub in enumerate(datalist): subnum = i + start_with subplot(3, 4, i) # format data (sub is a PANDAS dataframe) xdat = sub['x'][(sub['in_trl'] == True) & (sub['x'].notnull()) & (sub['y'].notnull())] ydat = sub['y'][(sub['in_trl'] == True) & (sub['x'].notnull()) & (sub['y'].notnull())] # plot hist2d(xdat, ydat, bins=1000) plot(0, 0, 'ro') # origin title('Subject {0} in-Trial Gaze'.format(subnum)) xlabel('Horizontal Offset (degrees visual angle)') ylabel('Vertical…

Accepted Answer

You want `ImageGrid` (tutorial).

First example lifted directly from that link (and lightly modified):

```
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import ImageGrid
import numpy as np

im = np.arange(100)
im.shape = 10, 10

fig = plt.figure(1, (4., 4.))
grid = ImageGrid(fig, 111, # similar to subplot(111)
                nrows_ncols = (2, 2), # creates 2x2 grid of axes
                axes_pad=0.1, # pad between axes in inch.
                aspect=False, # do not force aspect='equal'
                )

for i in range(4):
    grid[i].imshow(im) # The AxesGrid object work as a list of axes.

plt.show()
```

What can I do about the overlapping labels in these subplots?

Solution

Problem