Aligning rotating xticklabels with their respective xticks

Question

Check the x axis in the figure below. How to move labels a little to the left so that they coincide with the corresponding ticks?

I rotate the labels using:

ax.set_xticks(xlabels_positions) ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=45) 

But, as you can see, the rotation is centered on the middle of the text labels. They seem to be shifted to the right.

I tried using this instead:

 ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=45, rotation_mode="anchor") 

... but he does not do what I wanted. And the "anchor" seems to be the only value allowed for the rotation_mode parameter.

Answer 1

You can set horizontal alignment of marks, see example below. If you imagine a rectangular frame around a rotated label, on which side of the rectangle do you want to align with the control point?

Given your description, you want: ha = 'right'

 n=5 x = np.arange(n) y = np.sin(np.linspace(-3,3,n)) xlabels = ['Ticklabel %i' % i for i in range(n)] fig, axs = plt.subplots(1,3, figsize=(12,3)) ha = ['right', 'center', 'left'] for n, ax in enumerate(axs): ax.plot(x,y, 'o-') ax.set_title(ha[n]) ax.set_xticks(x) ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=40, ha=ha[n]) 

Answer 2

Rotating shortcuts is certainly possible. Please note that this reduces the readability of the text. One alternative is to replace the label positions with the following code:

 import numpy as np n=5 x = np.arange(n) y = np.sin(np.linspace(-3,3,n)) xlabels = ['Long ticklabel %i' % i for i in range(n)] fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.plot(x,y, 'o-') ax.set_xticks(x) labels = ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels) for i, label in enumerate(labels): label.set_y(label.get_position()[1] - (i % 2) * 0.075) 

For more information and alternatives, see this blog post.