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

As mentioned by others, by default the tight layout does not take suptitle into account. However, I have found it is possible to use the bbox_extra_artists argument to pass in the suptitle as a bounding box that should be taken into account:

st = fig.suptitle("My Super Title")
plt.savefig("figure.png", bbox_extra_artists=[st], bbox_inches='tight')

This forces the tight layout calculation to take the suptitle into account, and it looks as you would expect.