Re: [Matplotlib-users] How to plot only a legend?

[Andreas H. <li...@hi...>]

> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 06:05:39PM +0200, Andreas Hilboll wrote:
>> > Hi Andreas,
>> >
>> > 2012/7/26 Andreas Hilboll <li...@hi...>:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> I would like to create a figure which only contains a legend, and no
>> >> axes
>> >> at all. I would like to manually assign the colors. I found this
>> here:
>> >>
>> >>    http://stackoverflow.com/a/3302666
>> >>
>> >> but from there on, I'd like to remove the axes, and put the legend
>> into
>> >> three columns.
>> >
>> > If the plot attached it's fine for you it's easy:
>> >
>> > import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
>> > ax = plt.subplot()  #create the axes
>> > ax.set_axis_off()  #turn off the axis
>> > ....  #do patches and labels
>> > ax.legend(patches, labels, ...)  #legend alone in the figure
>> > plt.show()
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Francesco
>>
>> That's really easy :) I could live with this solution, applying some
>> external tool like pdfcrop to the result. Of course, it would be nicer
>> if
>> the PDF's page size would be exactly that of the legend (plus some
>> margin), so that I wouldn't have to resort to external tools ...
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
>
> How about
>
> plt.savefig('roflcakes.png', bbox_inches='tight', pad_inches=0.1)
>
> Since the other artists are invisible, that should crop to just your
> legend. I'm assuming matplotlib updates the BoundingBox such that it
> doesn't include invisible artists.

Thanks for your help, guys! I wasn't totally happy with the 'tight'
bounding box, as the margins to the legend were not uniform on all four
sides. So I did indeed return to a subprocess.call(['pdfcrop', ...]).

Cheers, A.