How can you clear a Matplotlib text box that was previously drawn?

Question

I can make text boxes in matplotlib fine. But I dont see how to remove them from a rendered plot? There seems to be no figure.text.clear() or figure.text(visible=False) after

Answer 1

Text boxes are artists. As such, you should be able to do lots of things with them if you keep a reference to them. Hence, in any plotting code, instead of

fig.text(0, 0, 'My text')

you can do

textvar = fig.text(0, 0, 'My text')

If you've lost the references, though, all the text objects can be found in the texts attribute:

fig.texts # is a list of Text objects

In version 1.3.1, doing textvar.remove() generates a NotImplementedError (apparently fixed in 1.4). However, you can get around that to some degree by setting the visibility to False.

for txt in fig.texts:
    txt.set_visible(False)

will make all your text boxes disappear.