Matplotlib Ticklabel Direction

Introduction

This lab will guide you through how to set the direction of tick labels in a Matplotlib plot. You will learn how to customize the direction of tick labels for both the x and y axes.

VM Tips

After the VM startup is done, click the top left corner to switch to the Notebook tab to access Jupyter Notebook for practice.

Sometimes, you may need to wait a few seconds for Jupyter Notebook to finish loading. The validation of operations cannot be automated because of limitations in Jupyter Notebook.

If you face issues during learning, feel free to ask Labby. Provide feedback after the session, and we will promptly resolve the problem for you.

Import necessary modules

First, we need to import the necessary modules to create our plot. We will be using Matplotlib and AxisArtist from mpl_toolkits.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axislines as axislines

Create a function to set up axes

We will create a function to set up our axes with the desired tick labels.

def setup_axes(fig, pos):
    ax = fig.add_subplot(pos, axes_class=axislines.Axes)
    ax.set_yticks([0.2, 0.8])
    ax.set_xticks([0.2, 0.8])
    return ax

Customize tick label direction

We will create three subplots to demonstrate different ways to customize the direction of tick labels.

Tick labels pointing outwards

In this step, we will create a subplot with tick labels pointing outwards.

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6, 3))
fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=0.2)

ax = setup_axes(fig, 131)
for axis in ax.axis.values():
    axis.major_ticks.set_tick_out(True)

Customized tick label direction

In this step, we will create a subplot with customized tick label direction.

ax = setup_axes(fig, 132)
ax.axis["left"].set_axis_direction("right")
ax.axis["bottom"].set_axis_direction("top")
ax.axis["right"].set_axis_direction("left")
ax.axis["top"].set_axis_direction("bottom")

Tick labels pointing outwards on one side

In this step, we will create a subplot with tick labels pointing outwards on one side.

ax = setup_axes(fig, 133)
ax.axis["left"].set_axis_direction("right")
ax.axis[:].major_ticks.set_tick_out(True)

ax.axis["left"].label.set_text("Long Label Left")
ax.axis["bottom"].label.set_text("Label Bottom")
ax.axis["right"].label.set_text("Long Label Right")
ax.axis["right"].label.set_visible(True)
ax.axis["left"].label.set_pad(0)
ax.axis["bottom"].label.set_pad(10)

plt.show()

Summary

In this lab, we learned how to customize the direction of tick labels in a Matplotlib plot using AxisArtist. By using the set_axis_direction() and major_ticks.set_tick_out() methods, we can create subplots with different tick label directions.