Text alignment in a Matplotlib legend

Question

I am trying to right-align the entries in a matplotlib axes legend (by default they are left-aligned), but can\'t seem to find any way of doing this. The setup I have is bel

Answer 1

I tried to get the example work, but I couldn't.

At least since matplotlib version 1.1.1 (maybe earlier) we need a dedicated renderer instance. Take care of your backend which defines the renderer. Depending on backend the output may look fine on screen but dismal as PDF.

# get the width of your widest label, since every label will need 
#to shift by this amount after we align to the right
renderer = figure.canvas.get_renderer()
shift = max([t.get_window_extent(renderer).width for t in legend.get_texts()])
for t in legend.get_texts():
    t.set_ha('right') # ha is alias for horizontalalignment
    t.set_position((shift,0))

Answer 2

The backdoor you're looking for is the following:

# get the width of your widest label, since every label will need 
# to shift by this amount after we align to the right
shift = max([t.get_window_extent().width for t in legend.get_texts()])
for t in legend.get_texts():
    t.set_ha('right') # ha is alias for horizontalalignment
    t.set_position((shift,0))