Matplotlib tight_layout() doesn't take into account figure suptitle

Question

If I add a subtitle to my matplotlib figure it gets overlaid by the subplot\'s titles. Does anybody know how to easily take care of that? I tried the tight_layout()

Answer 1

One thing you could change in your code very easily is the fontsize you are using for the titles. However, I am going to assume that you don't just want to do that!

Some alternatives to using fig.subplots_adjust(top=0.85):

Usually tight_layout() does a pretty good job at positioning everything in good locations so that they don't overlap. The reason tight_layout() doesn't help in this case is because tight_layout() does not take fig.suptitle() into account. There is an open issue about this on GitHub: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/829 [closed in 2014 due to requiring a full geometry manager - shifted to https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/1109 ].

If you read the thread, there is a solution to your problem involving GridSpec. The key is to leave some space at the top of the figure when calling tight_layout, using the rect kwarg. For your problem, the code becomes:

Using GridSpec

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.gridspec as gridspec

f = np.random.random(100)
g = np.random.random(100)

fig = plt.figure(1)
gs1 = gridspec.GridSpec(1, 2)
ax_list = [fig.add_subplot(ss) for ss in gs1]

ax_list[0].plot(f)
ax_list[0].set_title('Very Long Title 1', fontsize=20)

ax_list[1].plot(g)
ax_list[1].set_title('Very Long Title 2', fontsize=20)

fig.suptitle('Long Suptitle', fontsize=24)    

gs1.tight_layout(fig, rect=[0, 0.03, 1, 0.95])  

plt.show()

The result:

Maybe GridSpec is a bit overkill for you, or your real problem will involve many more subplots on a much larger canvas, or other complications. A simple hack is to just use annotate() and lock the coordinates to the 'figure fraction' to imitate a suptitle. You may need to make some finer adjustments once you take a look at the output, though. Note that this second solution does not use tight_layout().

Simpler solution (though may need to be fine-tuned)

fig = plt.figure(2)

ax1 = plt.subplot(121)
ax1.plot(f)
ax1.set_title('Very Long Title 1', fontsize=20)

ax2 = plt.subplot(122)
ax2.plot(g)
ax2.set_title('Very Long Title 2', fontsize=20)

# fig.suptitle('Long Suptitle', fontsize=24)
# Instead, do a hack by annotating the first axes with the desired 
# string and set the positioning to 'figure fraction'.
fig.get_axes()[0].annotate('Long Suptitle', (0.5, 0.95), 
                            xycoords='figure fraction', ha='center', 
                            fontsize=24
                            )
plt.show()

The result:

[Using Python 2.7.3 (64-bit) and matplotlib 1.2.0]