How to put the legend out of the plot

Question

I have a series of 20 plots (not subplots) to be made in a single figure. I want the legend to be outside of the box. At the same time, I do not want to change the axes, a

Answer 1

Not exactly what you asked for, but I found it's an alternative for the same problem. Make the legend semi-transparant, like so:

Do this with:

fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot(x,y,label=label,color=color)
# Make the legend transparent:
ax.legend(loc=2,fontsize=10,fancybox=True).get_frame().set_alpha(0.5)
# Make a transparent text box
ax.text(0.02,0.02,yourstring, verticalalignment='bottom',
                     horizontalalignment='left',
                     fontsize=10,
                     bbox={'facecolor':'white', 'alpha':0.6, 'pad':10},
                     transform=self.ax.transAxes)