How to make pylab.savefig() save image for 'maximized' window instead of default size

Question

I am using pylab in matplotlib to create a plot and save the plot to an image file. However, when I save the image using pylab.savefig( image_name ), I find tha

Answer 1

You can look in a saved figure it's size, like 1920x983 px (size when i saved a maximized window), then I set the dpi as 100 and the size as 19.20x9.83 and it worked fine. Saved exactly equal to the maximized figure.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x, y = np.genfromtxt('fname.dat', usecols=(0,1), unpack=True)
a = plt.figure(figsize=(19.20,9.83))
a = plt.plot(x, y, '-')
plt.savefig('file.png',format='png',dpi=100)

Answer 2

I did the same search time ago, it seems that he exact solution depends on the backend.

I have read a bunch of sources and probably the most useful was the answer by Pythonio here How to maximize a plt.show() window using Python I adjusted the code and ended up with the function below. It works decently for me on windows, I mostly use Qt, where I use it quite often, while it is minimally tested with other backends.

Basically it consists in identifying the backend and calling the appropriate function. Note that I added a pause afterwards because I was having issues with some windows getting maximized and others not, it seems this solved for me.

def maximize(backend=None,fullscreen=False):
    """Maximize window independently on backend.
    Fullscreen sets fullscreen mode, that is same as maximized, but it doesn't have title bar (press key F to toggle full screen mode)."""
    if backend is None:
        backend=matplotlib.get_backend()
    mng = plt.get_current_fig_manager()

    if fullscreen:
        mng.full_screen_toggle()
    else:
        if backend == 'wxAgg':
            mng.frame.Maximize(True)
        elif backend == 'Qt4Agg' or backend == 'Qt5Agg':
            mng.window.showMaximized()
        elif backend == 'TkAgg':
            mng.window.state('zoomed') #works fine on Windows!
        else:
            print ("Unrecognized backend: ",backend) #not tested on different backends (only Qt)
    plt.show()

    plt.pause(0.1) #this is needed to make sure following processing gets applied (e.g. tight_layout)