[Matplotlib-users] faq: reducing figure.figsize cuts off labels and tick marks

[Daniel M. <dan...@go...>]

Hi,

there has been a similar question recently but I couldn't figure out
if or how this is solved:

I'd like to reduce the figure size so that I can add it to a LaTeX
document without scaling (PDF output with LaTeX font rendering). For
that, I need to adapt the font sizes, too.

Unfortunately, the canvas is not properly scaled so that the axis
labels and the possibly the tick marks are cut off.

Is this a bug, feature, design flaw? How can I properly work around
it, i.e. reduce the graph automatically for a given figsize/font size
combination so that everything fits on the figure?

An example follows to demonstrate, thanks in advance,
Daniel

import numpy,pylab,matplotlib.ticker as mtick

x = numpy.linspace(0,10,1000)
y = numpy.exp(x)

pylab.rcdefaults()

fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.set_yscale('log')
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.FormatStrFormatter('%d'))
ax.set_xlabel('asdf')
ax.set_ylabel('qwer')
ax.plot(x,y)
fig.savefig('example_mpl-ticker_1')

pylab.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = 5,3
pylab.rcParams['font.size'] = 12

fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.set_yscale('log')
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.FormatStrFormatter('%d'))
ax.set_xlabel('asdf')
ax.set_ylabel('qwer')
ax.plot(x,y)
fig.savefig('example_mpl-ticker_2')