Matplotlib legend at the bottom of the plot

Skill - Matplotlib legend at the bottom of the plot

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Skills Required

• Setup python development environment
• Basic Printing in Python
• Commenting in Python
• Managing Variables in python
• Introduction to Matplotlib plotting library
• Styling Matplotlib plots

Please make sure to have all the skills mentioned above to understand and execute the code mentioned below. Go through the above skills if necessary for reference or revision

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Matplotlib is a plotting library tn the scipy ecosystem of libraries.

Please make sure that you covered the post on basics

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In order to place the legend at the bottom using ax.legend function, we can use the following options

• bbox_to_anchor - location of the legend anchor w.r.t the plot bounding box. Anchor location is specified as (x,y)
• loc - Location of the legend anchor w.r.t legend box
• ncol - Max number of columns in the legend box
• borderaxespad - padding between axes and legend border in terms of font-size

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import random

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
numLines = 5

for k in range(numLines):
    vals = [random.randint(0, 10) for x in range(4)]
    la,  = ax.plot([1, 2, 3, 4], vals)
    la.set_label("Another line {0}".format(k+1))

ax.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(0, -.1), loc='upper left',
          ncol=3, borderaxespad=0)

ax.set_title("Figure Title")

plt.show()

Video

You can the video on this post here

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Online Interpreter

Although we recommend to practice the above examples in Visual Studio Code, you can run these examples online at https://pynative.com/online-python-code-editor-to-execute-python-code/

References

• Awesome blog post on legend placement - https://jdhao.github.io/2018/01/23/matplotlib-legend-outside-of-axes/
• Official legend function documentation - https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.legend.html#matplotlib.axes.Axes.legend

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