Changing tick label line spacing in matplotlib

Question

I have a quite cluttered plot with y-ticklabels that need to be very long. I've resorted into wrapping them into multiline text with textwrap . However that makes the labels overlap (or at least come too close), between categories.

I can't solve it by spacing the ticks, making the graph larger, changing font or making the text smaller. (I've already pushed these limits)

As I see it, I could resolve and make it work if I could adjust the line spacing/height to be less than what the font requests.

So imagine for simplicity's sake the following tick-label desperately needs shorter line distance between lines/line height:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
plt.barh(0.75, 10, height=0.5)
plt.ylim(0, 2)
plt.yticks([1], ["A very long label\nbroken into 2 line"])
plt.subplots_adjust(left=0.3)
plt.show()

I've checked plt.tick_params() the rcParams without finding any obvious solution. I'm using latex to format the text, but trying to use \\hspace(0.5em} in the tick label string seemed not to work/only make things worse.

Any suggestion as to how the line spacing can be decreased would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use the linespacing keyword in your plt.yticks line. For example:

plt.yticks([1], ["A very long label\nbroken into 2 line"],linespacing=0.5)

You can play with the exact value of linespacing to fit your needs. Hope that helps.

Here's the original output of your code:

And here it is with a linespacing of 0.5:

Answer 2

Attempt using this:

pylab.rcParams['xtick.major.pad']='???'

Mess around with the ??? value to get something you like. You could also try (sing the OO interface):

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.tick_params(axis='both', which='major', labelsize=8)
ax.set_yticks([1], ["A very long label\nbroken into 2 line"], linespacing=0.5)
plt.show()

The labelsize command will change the size of your font.

Use a combination of the above with the rcparams setup.