Animate points with labels with matplotlib

Question

I\'ve got an animation with lines and now I want to label the points. I tried plt.annotate() and I tried plt.text() but the labes don\'t move. This

Answer 1

I'm coming here from this question, where an annotation should be updated that uses both xy and xytext. It appears that, in order to update the annotation correctly, one needs to set the attribute .xy of the annotation to set the position of the annotated point and to use the .set_position() method of the annotation to set the position of the annotation. Setting the .xytext attribute has no effect -- somewhat confusing in my opinion. Below a complete example:

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

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.set_xlim([-1,1])
ax.set_ylim([-1,1])

L = 50
theta = np.linspace(0,2*np.pi,L)
r = np.ones_like(theta)

x = r*np.cos(theta)
y = r*np.sin(theta)

line, = ax.plot(1,0, 'ro')

annotation = ax.annotate(
    'annotation', xy=(1,0), xytext=(-1,0),
    arrowprops = {'arrowstyle': "->"}
)

def update(i):

    new_x = x[i%L]
    new_y = y[i%L]
    line.set_data(new_x,new_y)

    ##annotation.xytext = (-new_x,-new_y) <-- does not work
    annotation.set_position((-new_x,-new_y))
    annotation.xy = (new_x,new_y)

    return line, annotation

ani = animation.FuncAnimation(
    fig, update, interval = 500, blit = False
)

plt.show()

The result looks something like this:

In case that versions matter, this code has been tested on Python 2.7 and 3.6 with matplotlib version 2.1.1, and in both cases setting .xytext had no effect, while .set_position() and .xy worked as expected.