How to remove frame from matplotlib (pyplot.figure vs matplotlib.figure ) (frameon=False Problematic in matplotlib)

Question

To remove frame in figure, I write

frameon=False

works perfect with pyplot.figure, but with matplotlib.Figure it

Answer 1

df = pd.DataFrame({
'client_scripting_ms' : client_scripting_ms,
 'apimlayer' : apimlayer, 'server' : server
}, index = index)

ax = df.plot(kind = 'barh', 
     stacked = True,
     title = "Chart",
     width = 0.20, 
     align='center', 
     figsize=(7,5))

plt.legend(loc='upper right', frameon=True)

ax.spines['right'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['top'].set_visible(False)

ax.yaxis.set_ticks_position('left')
ax.xaxis.set_ticks_position('right')

Answer 2

Building up on @peeol's excellent answer, you can also remove the frame by doing

for spine in plt.gca().spines.values():
    spine.set_visible(False)

To give an example (the entire code sample can be found at the end of this post), let's say you have a bar plot like this,

you can remove the frame with the commands above and then either keep the x- and ytick labels (plot not shown) or remove them as well doing

plt.tick_params(top='off', bottom='off', left='off', right='off', labelleft='off', labelbottom='on')

In this case, one can then label the bars directly; the final plot could look like this (code can be found below):

Here is the entire code that is necessary to generate the plots:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.figure()

xvals = list('ABCDE')
yvals = np.array(range(1, 6))

position = np.arange(len(xvals))

mybars = plt.bar(position, yvals, align='center', linewidth=0)
plt.xticks(position, xvals)

plt.title('My great data')
# plt.show()

# get rid of the frame
for spine in plt.gca().spines.values():
    spine.set_visible(False)

# plt.show()
# remove all the ticks and directly label each bar with respective value
plt.tick_params(top='off', bottom='off', left='off', right='off', labelleft='off', labelbottom='on')

# plt.show()

# direct label each bar with Y axis values
for bari in mybars:
    height = bari.get_height()
    plt.gca().text(bari.get_x() + bari.get_width()/2, bari.get_height()-0.2, str(int(height)),
                 ha='center', color='white', fontsize=15)
plt.show()

Answer 3

As I answered here, you can remove spines from all your plots through style settings (style sheet or rcParams):

import matplotlib as mpl

mpl.rcParams['axes.spines.left'] = False
mpl.rcParams['axes.spines.right'] = False
mpl.rcParams['axes.spines.top'] = False
mpl.rcParams['axes.spines.bottom'] = False

Answer 4

plt.box(False)
plt.xticks([])
plt.yticks([])
plt.savefig('fig.png')

should do the trick.

Answer 5

To remove the frame of the chart

for spine in plt.gca().spines.values():
  spine.set_visible(False)

I hope this could work

Answer 6

The easiest way to get rid of the the ugly frame in newer versions of matplotlib:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.box(False)

If you really must always use the object oriented approach, then do: ax.set_frame_on(False).