Matplotlib showing x-tick labels overlapping

Question

Have a look at the graph below:

It\'s a subplot of this larger figure:

Answer 1

Ok, finally got it working. The trick was to use plt.setp to manually rotate the tick labels. Using fig.autofmt_xdate() did not work as it does some unexpected things when you have multiple subplots in your figure. Here's the working code with its output:

for i, d in enumerate([360, 30, 7, 1]):
    ax = axes.flatten()[i]
    earlycut = now - relativedelta(days=d)
    data = df.loc[df.index>=earlycut, :]
    ax.plot(data.index, data['value'])

    ax.get_xaxis().set_minor_locator(mpl.ticker.AutoMinorLocator())
    ax.get_yaxis().set_minor_locator(mpl.ticker.AutoMinorLocator())

    ax.grid(b=True, which='major', color='w', linewidth=1.5)
    ax.grid(b=True, which='minor', color='w', linewidth=0.75)

    plt.setp(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=30, horizontalalignment='right')

fig.tight_layout()

By the way, the comment earlier about some matplotlib things taking forever is very interesting here. I'm using a raspberry pi to act as a weather station at a remote location. It's collecting the data and serving the results via the web. And boy oh boy, it's really wheezing trying to put out these graphics.

Answer 2

Due to the way text rendering is handled in matplotlib, auto-detecting overlapping text really slows things down. (The space that text takes up can't be accurately calculated until after it's been drawn.) For that reason, matplotlib doesn't try to do this automatically.

Therefore, it's best to rotate long tick labels. Because dates most commonly have this problem, there's a figure method fig.autofmt_xdate() that will (among other things) rotate the tick labels to make them a bit more readable. (Note: If you're using a pandas plot method, it returns an axes object, so you'll need to use ax.figure.autofmt_xdate().)

As a quick example:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

time = pd.date_range('01/01/2014', '4/01/2014', freq='H')
values = np.random.normal(0, 1, time.size).cumsum()

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot_date(time, values, marker='', linestyle='-')

fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()

If we were to leave fig.autofmt_xdate() out:

And if we use fig.autofmt_xdate():