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I want to reduce the verticalspacing between subplot. Surfing along the web I just have found how to reduce the horizontal spacing, something like

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=4, ncols=4)
fig.tight_layout() # Or equivalently,  "plt.tight_layout()"
fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.5)
plt.show()

The hspace thing is the one that manipulates such behaviour, but apparently there's no vspace.

EDIT:

This does not reduce the space between the y-axis, that is what I want to manipulate.

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2
  • 1
    Your code does reduce the space between vertical subplots. Commented Mar 2, 2016 at 18:17
  • I mean, it does not reduce the space between y-axis in the subplots, that is what I want to do. Commented Mar 2, 2016 at 18:34

3 Answers 3

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50

As you said in your question hspace reduces the vertical spacing between subplots. The equivalent for horizontal spacing between subplots is wspace. Below is an example:

x = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 400)
y = np.sin(x ** 2)


fig, ((ax1,ax2),(ax3,ax4)) = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2)
fig.tight_layout()
ax1.plot(x, y)
ax2.scatter(x, y)
ax3.scatter(x, y)
ax4.scatter(x, y)

fig.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.2)
plt.show()

Using a value for 1 for wspace gives enter image description here

Using 0.2 as the value of wspace gives

enter image description here

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4 Comments

how counterintuitive to have wspace instead of hspace!
I suppose hspace is height and wspace is width? But yes, a bit counterintuitive!
wspace and hspace force the subplots to get smaller.
I've found out that fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=..., wspace=...) works with fig.tight_layout(), but silently fails when used with plt.subplots(..., tight_layout=True). (matplotlib 3.5.2).
9

An alternative approach is to pass the gridspec_kw argument a dict with keys wspace / hspace:

Example

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, gridspec_kw={'hspace': 0.2, 'wspace': 0.9})
plt.tight_layout()

for ax, color in zip(axes.ravel(), list('rgbk')):
    ax.scatter(np.arange(100), np.random.randn(100), color=color)

enter image description here

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8

If I understood your question correctly, you want to reduce the vertical spacing, which is not what I have seen in all of the answers above.

If I am correct, you should reduce the hspace from 0.5 to 0.2, for instance. That's because hspace does not stand for horizontal spacing, it stands for height spacing, which is what you need.

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1 Comment

Thank you for clarifying why you believe the existing answers aren’t relevant, and paraphrasing how you’re interpreting the question. That’s a good practice when answering old questions with established answers.

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