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Excessive white space / margins with some plots. #586
Description
With the current ipympl 0.9.6 (and probably earlier versions) I am observing excessive white space around axes in some cases when using the %matplotlib ipympl mode but not in the %matplotlib inline mode.
A small example to reproduce:
%matplotlib ipympl
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5, 3), constrained_layout=True)
ax.imshow([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
ax.set_aspect(0.1)This yields:
And the same example in inline mode:
%matplotlib inline
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5, 3), constrained_layout=True)
ax.imshow([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
ax.set_aspect(0.1)
Especially larger figures then became unmanageable in the ipympl backend. Setting constrained_layout or using plt.tight_layout() does not seem to influence the margins. Can this behavior be influenced?
Activity
ianhi commentedon Feb 18, 2025
inlineultimately setsbbox_inches='tight'and changes the figure shape which is why there is less whitespace. Thetightorconstrainedlayouts move axes around inside of the figure without changing the figize. With the aspect ratio you are using that is the least possible amount of whitespace without making the figure smaller.This is not unique to ipympl. You can see the same behavior with the
qtbackend:The solution here is to change your figsize to better match the aspect ratio of your plot
Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to automatically change the figsize to better match the axes. What
bbox_inches='tight'insavefigdoes is effectively to crop the figure before display, but that only makes sense when using a static display as in inline.