Matplotlib tight_layout() doesn't take into account figure suptitle

Question

If I add a subtitle to my matplotlib figure it gets overlaid by the subplot\'s titles. Does anybody know how to easily take care of that? I tried the tight_layout()

Answer 1

You could manually adjust the spacing using plt.subplots_adjust(top=0.85):

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f = np.random.random(100)
g = np.random.random(100)
fig = plt.figure()
fig.suptitle('Long Suptitle', fontsize=24)
plt.subplot(121)
plt.plot(f)
plt.title('Very Long Title 1', fontsize=20)
plt.subplot(122)
plt.plot(g)
plt.title('Very Long Title 2', fontsize=20)
plt.subplots_adjust(top=0.85)
plt.show()

Answer 2

I have struggled with the matplotlib trimming methods, so I've now just made a function to do this via a bash call to ImageMagick's mogrify command, which works well and gets all extra white space off the figure's edge. This requires that you are using UNIX/Linux, are using the bash shell, and have ImageMagick installed.

Just throw a call to this after your savefig() call.

def autocrop_img(filename):
    '''Call ImageMagick mogrify from bash to autocrop image'''
    import subprocess
    import os

    cwd, img_name = os.path.split(filename)

    bashcmd = 'mogrify -trim %s' % img_name
    process = subprocess.Popen(bashcmd.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE, cwd=cwd)

Answer 3

I had a similar issue that cropped up when using tight_layout for a very large grid of plots (more than 200 subplots) and rendering in a jupyter notebook. I made a quick solution that always places your suptitle at a certain distance above your top subplot:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

n_rows = 50
n_col = 4
fig, axs = plt.subplots(n_rows, n_cols)

#make plots ...

# define y position of suptitle to be ~20% of a row above the top row
y_title_pos = axs[0][0].get_position().get_points()[1][1]+(1/n_rows)*0.2
fig.suptitle('My Sup Title', y=y_title_pos)

For variably-sized subplots, you can still use this method to get the top of the topmost subplot, then manually define an additional amount to add to the suptitle.

Answer 4

This website has a simple solution to this with an example that worked for me. The line of code that does the actual leaving of space for the title is the following:

plt.tight_layout(rect=[0, 0, 1, 0.95]) 

Here is an image of proof that it worked for me: