How to place the suptitle rotated on the side of the figure

Question

I’m working with Matplotlib in Python, and have the simple figure-suptitle layout shown below

  Title
----------
|Figure  |
|Pieces  |
----------

The figure pieces are squished a bit, however. To make room, I would like to put the figure suptitle on the side, like so

----------   
|Figure  | (title rotated 90 degrees) 
|Pieces  |
----------

The reason I would like to do this is that there are 47 of these, and each will go on its own 8.5" x 11" page. An alternative would be to rotate the figure itself, although I imagine that might be harder.

Asked By: David McKnight

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Source

Answer 1

Use the rotation parameter.
See matplotlib.pyplot.suptitle & matplotlib.text.Text for available parameters.
- This works for the explicit Axes interface, and for the implicit pyplot interface.
This answer also works for seaborn axes-level plots.
Also see Improve subplot size/spacing with many subplots.
Tested in python 3.10 and matplotlib 3.5.2

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

names = ['group_a', 'group_b', 'group_c']
values = [1, 10, 100]

fig, ax = plt.subplots(3, 1, figsize=(3, 9))

ax[0].bar(names, values)
ax[1].scatter(names, values)
ax[2].plot(names, values)
fig.suptitle('Categorical Plotting', ha='right', va='center', x=1.1, y=0.5, rotation=270)
plt.show()

names = ['group_a', 'group_b', 'group_c']
values = [1, 10, 100]

plt.figure(figsize=(9, 3))

plt.subplot(131)
plt.bar(names, values)
plt.subplot(132)
plt.scatter(names, values)
plt.subplot(133)
plt.plot(names, values)
plt.suptitle('Categorical Plotting', ha='right', va='center', x=0.95, y=0.5, rotation=270)
plt.show()

Answered By: Trenton McKinney

How to place the suptitle rotated on the side of the figure

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