Figure labels: suptitle, supxlabel, supylabelΒΆ

Each axes can have a title (or actually three - one each with loc "left", "center", and "right"), but is sometimes desirable to give a whole figure (or SubFigure) an overall title, using FigureBase.suptitle.

We can also add figure-level x- and y-labels using FigureBase.supxlabel and FigureBase.supylabel.

from matplotlib.cbook import get_sample_data
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import numpy as np


x = np.linspace(0.0, 5.0, 501)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, constrained_layout=True, sharey=True)
ax1.plot(x, np.cos(6*x) * np.exp(-x))
ax1.set_title('damped')
ax1.set_xlabel('time (s)')
ax1.set_ylabel('amplitude')

ax2.plot(x, np.cos(6*x))
ax2.set_xlabel('time (s)')
ax2.set_title('undamped')

fig.suptitle('Different types of oscillations', fontsize=16)
Different types of oscillations, damped, undamped

Out:

Text(0.5, 0.99131875, 'Different types of oscillations')

A global x- or y-label can be set using the FigureBase.supxlabel and FigureBase.supylabel methods.

fig, axs = plt.subplots(3, 5, figsize=(8, 5), constrained_layout=True,
                        sharex=True, sharey=True)

fname = get_sample_data('percent_bachelors_degrees_women_usa.csv',
                        asfileobj=False)
gender_degree_data = np.genfromtxt(fname, delimiter=',', names=True)

majors = ['Health Professions', 'Public Administration', 'Education',
          'Psychology', 'Foreign Languages', 'English',
          'Art and Performance', 'Biology',
          'Agriculture', 'Business',
          'Math and Statistics', 'Architecture', 'Physical Sciences',
          'Computer Science', 'Engineering']

for nn, ax in enumerate(axs.flat):
    ax.set_xlim(1969.5, 2011.1)
    column = majors[nn]
    column_rec_name = column.replace('\n', '_').replace(' ', '_')

    line, = ax.plot('Year', column_rec_name, data=gender_degree_data,
                    lw=2.5)
    ax.set_title(column, fontsize='small', loc='left')
    ax.set_ylim([0, 100])
    ax.grid()
fig.supxlabel('Year')
fig.supylabel('Percent Degrees Awarded To Women')

plt.show()
Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, Psychology, Foreign Languages, English, Art and Performance, Biology, Agriculture, Business, Math and Statistics, Architecture, Physical Sciences, Computer Science, Engineering

Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 2.447 seconds)

Keywords: matplotlib code example, codex, python plot, pyplot Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery