Re: [Matplotlib-users] plots do not scale to size

[Paul A. L. <pau...@gm...>]

On 9. juni. 2009, at 17.18, Jouni K. Seppänen wrote:

> Chaitanya Krishna <ic...@gm...> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Paul Anton Letnes <pau...@gm... 
>> > wrote:
>>>
>>> When I run the script below, the xlabel and ylabel do not show up.  
>>> If I
>>> increase the figure size, it all works fine.
>>
>> I am not sure if it is a bug. But, it is usual that such a thing
>> happens when you are making small figures (like in your case).
>
> Arguably it is a bug, since it is reasonable to expect that when you  
> set
> an xlabel or ylabel (or, say, large yticklabels), it shows up in the
> figure. There are at least two problems to solve here: what should the
> user interface be like, and how can it best be implemented?
>
> The user interface question seems difficult to me. If you set the  
> figure
> size to something small (as in this case) and then add labels, should
> matplotlib reduce the area available for the plot? Or should it reduce
> the font size of the labels and the tick labels, and perhaps the  
> amount
> of white space between the axes and the labels? Or some combination of
> these?
>
> The implementation question could also be somewhat hairy, since the
> bounding box of text objects depends on the backend. If agg and pdf
> disagree on the size of a label, is it OK to get different-looking
> results in png and pdf?
>
> -- 
> Jouni K. Seppänen
> http://www.iki.fi/jks
>
>
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This _must_ be a bug. Consider the following:
##############
import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [8.85, 3.20]
matplotlib.use('pdf')
from pylab import *

xs = linspace(0, 2 * pi)
ys = sin(xs)
plot(xs, ys)
xlabel(r'$T_{est}$')
ylabel('y axis')

savefig('test')
##############
Here, the vertical size is clearly large enough for a label, as it is  
a full inch larger than in the previous example. However, the xlabel  
is truncated. This _must_ be a bug. When I make a plot, I would expect  
that all parts of the plot appear on the plot.

As an example, in Gnuplot, the text just appears in the "right place",  
but is too large (overlaps the plot, etc). Hence, you see for yourself  
that the font size is the problem.

Anyway, it can't be the font size here, as the xlabel was completely  
outside the "bounding box" (I'm not sure of the terminology). To me,  
it just looks like a problem with the scaling - the plot looks  
perfectly OK in Illustrator, disregarding that it doesn't fit inside  
the "viewing window".

I'm not an expert, and I certainly don't know how to fix this. But I  
do know that other software manages this nicely. Don't get me wrong, I  
use matplotlib because I like it - but it should be possible to fix  
this problem.


Best regards,
Paul.