Why is my xlabel cut off in my matplotlib plot?
I am plotting a dataset using matplotlib where I have an xlabel that is quite "tall" (it's a formula rendered in TeX that contains a fraction and is therefore has the height equivalent of a couple of lines of text).
In any case, the bottom of the formula is always cut off when I draw the figures. Changing figure size doesn't seem to help this, and I haven't been able to figure out how to shift the x-axis "up" to make room for the xlabel. Something like that would be a reasonable temporary solution, but what would be nice would be to have a way to make matplotlib recognize automatically that the label is cut off and resize accordingly.
Here's an example of what I mean:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure()
plt.ylabel(r'$\ln\left(\frac{x_a-x_b}{x_a-x_c}\right)$')
plt.xlabel(r'$\ln\left(\frac{x_a-x_d}{x_a-x_e}\right)$')
plt.show()
while you can see the entire ylabel, the xlabel is cut off at the bottom.
In the case this is a machine-specific problem, I am running this on OSX 10.6.8 with matplotlib 1.0.0
Answer
Use:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.15)
to make room for the label.
Edit:
Since i gave the answer, matplotlib has added the tight_layout() function.
So i suggest to use it:
plt.tight_layout()
should make room for the xlabel.