Matplotlib - Different tick label alignment along the same axis

Question

I have a figure with a lot of subplot, such that the last ticklabel of an axis is written over the first tick label of the next one. See example here

As I want to keep the spacing between the subplots as I set it, I would like to have a different alignment depending on the tick, as it could be produced by :

    plt.xticks([0], ha = 'left')
    plt.xticks([0.2,0.4], ha = 'center')
    plt.xticks([0.6], ha = 'right')

Using that, only the last call of xticks is shown on the figure. In another way, the idea is to align first and last tick labels such that they stay within the subplot.

Hope I'm clear !

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

Once you fix the ticks, you will be able to access and set the ticklabels' alignment as you wish to avoid overlapping between neighboring subplots.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams.update({"xtick.direction" : "in", 
                     "ytick.direction" : "in",
                     "figure.subplot.wspace" : 0.02,
                     "axes.xmargin" : 0,
                     "figure.figsize" : (5,2.4)})

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1,2, sharey=True)
for ax in axes:
    ax.plot([0,.3,.6], [0,1,2])
    # Fix ticks
    ax.set_xticks([0,.2,.4,.6])
    # Get ticklabels for fixed ticks
    ticklabels = ax.get_xticklabels()
    # set the alignment for outer ticklabels
    ticklabels[0].set_ha("left")
    ticklabels[-1].set_ha("right")

plt.show()