Increase space between subplots in Plots.jl

Question

How can I increase the space between subplots in Plots.jl?

Minimal non-working example:

julia> using Plots; pyplot()
Plots.PyPlotBackend()

julia> data = [rand(100), rand(100)];
       histogram(data, layout=2, title=["Dataset A" "Dataset B"], legend=false)
       ylabel!("ylabel")

If you make the figure small enough, the y label of the second plot collides with the first plot.

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 08 '18 at 09:32

In the attributes part of Plots.jl documentation, there is a section called Subplot. There, you will find the keywords margin, top_margin, bottom_margin, left_margin and right_margin that might help you.

Minimal working example would be, then:

using Plots, Measures
pyplot()

data = [rand(100), rand(100)];

histogram(data, layout = 2,
          title = ["Dataset A" "Dataset B"], legend = false,
          ylabel = "ylabel", margin = 5mm)

Note the using Measures part, by the way. I hope this helps.

Shayan · Answer 2 · 2022-11-24T20:58:13.590

Another workaround would be using the bottom_margin keyword argument holding the pyplot backend like this:

using Plots
pyplot()

x1 = rand(1:30, 20);
x2 = rand(1:30, 20);

# subplot 1
p1 = plot(
    x1,
    label="x1 value",
    title="x1 line plot",
    ylabel="x1",
    bottom_margin=50*Plots.mm,
);

# subplot 2
p2 = plot(
    x2,
    label="x2 value",
    title="x2 line plot",
    xlabel="sample",
    ylabel="x2",
);

plot(
    p1,
    p2,
    layout=grid(
        2,1,
    )
)

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 27 '23 at 22:59

An alternative is to use the empty figure object _ to occupy the space. It works well when a long legend name overlaps with another subplot with PGFPlotsX backend,

pgfplotsx()
p1 = plot(1:10, label = "a long label name")
p2 = plot(1:10)
plot(p1, p2)

we can use _ in @layout to leave more space for the legend of the first subplot,

plot(p1, p2, layout=@layout([a{0.5w} _ b{0.3w}]))

It can even handle more complicated cases. For example, you might just want to increase the space between two specific subplots instead of all subplots. For example, I use the setting

layout = @layout([grid(2, 1){0.3w} _ grid(2, 1){0.3w} b{0.33w}])

to leave more space via _ for the legend for the left two subplots grid(2,1), but do not touch other subplots.

Increase space between subplots in Plots.jl

3 Answers3