Text and annotations

To enhance the understanding of plot details, we may sometimes add in text annotations for explanation. We will now introduce the methods of adding and adjusting text in Matplotlib plots.

Adding text annotations

We can add text to our plot by calling plt.text(x,y,text); we specify the x and y coordinates and the text string. Here is a quick example:

plt.text(0.25,0.5,'Hello World!',fontsize=30)
plt.show()

You can see in this figure the Hello World! message appearing in the center of the plot:

Font

Here are some of the common font properties adjustable in Matplotlib:

• Font size: Float or relative size, for example, smaller and x-large
• Font weight: For example, bold or semibold
• Font style: For example, italic
• Font family: For example, Arial
• Rotation: Angle in degrees; it is vertical or horizontal

Note

Matplotlib now supports unicode and emoji.

Mathematical notations

As a plotting tool, mathematical notations are common. We can use the in-built mathtext or LaTeX to render mathematical...