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I want to increase the dpi of plots in matplotlib, but the window that displays the plot gets far too large when deviating from the default of 100. I've been using

import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 300
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (6.4, 4.8)

to increase the dpi of all plots shown and forcing it to have the default size but it still has the size issue. I would like it so that all plots displayed are uniform in size and dpi without having to individually set this for every figure. Any way to do this?

PHnoD
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1 Answers1

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I think that this won't work as you wish for. The resolution (given in dpi) determines how many points an inch has. The size defines how many inches the figure should have. But none of both sets the number of pixels that your monitor should display for an inch. The thing is that matplotlib and python do not resize plots (only images). So if you save the plot as an image and open it again (with any image viewer) and you click on "show me 100% size", the figure will behave as you intended it to. But while drawing the pixels in a plot (that is what matplotlib does if you call matplotlib.pyplot.draw()), it needs to draw every pixel, which is why one might think that figuresize and dpi both result in a larger plot in matplotlib. Essentially figuresize tells the image viewer how to resize the image when displaying it.

I found this post is particularly useful for explaining the different behavior of size and resolution.

max
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