How to change the font size on a matplotlib plot

python matplotlib font-size

Herman Schaaf · Oct 10, 2010 · Viewed 1.1M times · Source

How does one change the font size for all elements (ticks, labels, title) on a matplotlib plot?

I know how to change the tick label sizes, this is done with:

import matplotlib 
matplotlib.rc('xtick', labelsize=20) 
matplotlib.rc('ytick', labelsize=20)

But how does one change the rest?

Answer

font = {'family' : 'normal',
        'weight' : 'bold',
        'size'   : 22}

matplotlib.rc('font', **font)

This sets the font of all items to the font specified by the kwargs object, font.

Alternatively, you could also use the rcParams update method as suggested in this answer:

matplotlib.rcParams.update({'font.size': 22})

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams.update({'font.size': 22})

You can find a full list of available properties on the Customizing matplotlib page.