如何更改直方图的轴标签的字体大小

Question

I created a histogram of string occurrences based on a column of a pandas dataframe. The strings are quite long so when I plot the histogram, the labels get cut off. How do I change the size of the tick labels?

I am aware of set_xticklabels, but I'm not quite sure how to use this with the histogram I created.

Here's how I created my histogram:

assignments_df[['Major:']].apply(pd.value_counts).plot(kind = 'bar', subplots = True)
plt.savefig('Major_Distribution.png')

Answer 1

plt.xtics()

Look into the fontsize argument of plt.xticks() :

df = pd.DataFrame({'x':np.random.rand(20) // .01,
                  'y':np.random.rand(20) // .01})

df.plot(kind='bar')
plt.xticks(fontsize=8)
plt.show()

With rotation

You could also look into rotating your tick labels:

# Different example data:
df = pd.DataFrame({'x':['abcdedf','abcdef','abcde','abcd'],
                  'y':np.random.rand(4) // .01})

df.plot(kind='bar', x='x', y='y')
plt.xticks(fontsize=8, rotation=45)
plt.show()

Horizontal

Yet another option is to make your bar chart horizontal. It still takes up space (horizontal rather than vertical) but makes longer labels easier to read.

df = pd.DataFrame({'x':['abcdedf','abcdef','abcde','abcd'],
                  'y':np.random.rand(4) // .01})

plt.barh('x', 'y', data=df)
plt.show()

Answer 2

To change the font size you can use, assuming you have imported matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.xlabel('xlabel', fontsize=10)
plt.ylabel('ylabel', fontsize=10)