Adjusting the layout

Figure layout, including the size and location of plots, directs the focus of our readers. A figure with good layout facilitates data presentation in a logical flow. It is thus important to familiarize ourselves with layout settings when plotting. Let's learn how to assign proper sizes, positions, and spacing to our plots.

Adjusting the size of the figure

Depending on where you want to put your figure, you may want to adjust the size and layout. Instead of manually stretching your image output afterward, which takes extra effort and can distort the text. You can set the height and width directly by calling pyplot.figure(figsize=()). As briefly mentioned in Chapter 2, Figure Aesthetics, the figure module contains all the plot elements. The figsize setting controls the overall size in inches and aspect ratio of the figure. This is also useful when we want to show a larger plot directly in a notebook, without having to export it in a high-resolution image.

Here is an example...