Matplotlib: set label font without setting label

Question

I would like to write a function that changes the font of all of the labels in a figure that I pass to it without actually changing the labels themselves.

This is useful for figures that I have already created and need to have a uniform font style.

Currently I am using multiple font dictionaries like so:

titleFont = {'family' : 'Arial',
             'weight' : 'bold',
             'size'   : 20}
axesFont = {'family' : 'Arial',
             'weight' : 'bold',
             'size'   : 18}
axesTickFont = {'family' : 'Arial',
                'weight' : 'bold',
                'size'   : 16}`

And then setting the font sizes by using commands along the lines of:

ax.set_title('My Plot',**titleFont)

The issue is that with the command above, I need to specify a plot title, when all I want to do is set the font style of an existing title.

Something like this would be ideal:

def set_fonts(axis):
    axis.set_title(**titleFont)
    axis.set_ylabel(**axesFont)
    axis.set_xlabel(**axesFont)
    return axis

hitzg · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-23 20:27:41Z

1

This is probably not the cleanest solution, but it should do what you want:

def set_fonts(axis):
    axis.set_title(axis.get_title(), **titleFont)
    axis.set_ylabel(axis.get_ylabel(), **axesFont)
    axis.set_xlabel(axis.get_xlabel(), **axesFont)
    return axis

Otherwise you can directly access the relevant artist instances, which avoids reassigning the text:

def set_fonts(axis):
    plt.setp(axis.title, **titleFont)
    plt.setp(axis.xaxis.label, **axesFont)
    plt.setp(axis.yaxis.label, **axesFont)
    return axis

edited Sep 23, 2015 at 20:27

answered Sep 23, 2015 at 20:16

hitzg

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4 Comments

YoungPadawan Over a year ago

Thanks @hitzg! that works very well. I wasn't able to implement the second solution because I don't know how to point to the ticklabels object. axis.xaxis.ticklabels doesn't work. Do you know where I can find a breakdown of mpl objects so that I can understand better what is going on from an object oriented point of view?

hitzg Over a year ago

To get the ticklabel objects you can use axis.get_xticklabels() and axis.get_yticklabels(). I agree that it is somewhat inconsistent that some of the getter functions return the artists and some just an attribute of the artist (e.g., axis.get_xlabel() which only returns the text and not the text-artist).

YoungPadawan Over a year ago

And with the plt.setp method, how could I access the ticklabels?

hitzg Over a year ago

I guess that plt.setp(axis.get_xticklabels(), **axesFont) should work.

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