Adjust exponent text after setting scientific limits on matplotlib axis

Question

At the moment if I set matplotlib y axis ticklabels to scientific mode it gives me an exponent at the top of the y axis of the form 1e-5

I\'d like to ad

Answer 1

Building on @KirstieJane's solution, I found a sightly better way, wich also works without having to call tight_layout, and in particular, also works for figures using constrained_layout. Calling ax.get_tightbbox(renderer) is all that is necessary for setting the text. Here is an MWE:

import sys
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.tight_layout import get_renderer
from matplotlib.backends.backend_qt5agg import \
    FigureCanvasQTAgg as FigureCanvas
# from matplotlib.transforms import Bbox
# from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import make_axes_locatable

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QDialog, QApplication, QGridLayout


class MainWindow(QDialog):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        fig, ax = plt.subplots(constrained_layout=True)
        canvas = FigureCanvas(fig)
        lay = QGridLayout(self)
        lay.addWidget(canvas)
        self.setLayout(lay)

        image = np.random.uniform(10000000, 100000000, (100, 100))
        image_artist = ax.imshow(image)
        colorbar = fig.colorbar(image_artist)
        colorbar.ax.ticklabel_format()
        renderer = get_renderer(fig)
        colorbar.ax.get_tightbbox(renderer)
        colorbar.ax.yaxis.offsetText.set_visible(False)
        offset_text = colorbar.ax.yaxis.get_offset_text()
        exp = offset_text.get_text().split('e')[1].replace('+', '')
        colorbar.ax.set_ylabel(rf'Parameter [U${{\times}}10^{{{exp}}}$]')

        canvas.draw_idle()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    GUI = MainWindow()
    GUI.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

For a thorough discussion of the solution, see my answer here.