Fine control over the font size in Seaborn plots for academic papers

Question

I'm currently trying to use Seaborn to create plots for my academic papers. The plots look great and easy to generate, but one problem that I'm having some trouble with is having the fine control on the font size in the plots.

My font size in my paper is 9pt and I would like to make sure the font size in my plots are either 9pt or 10pt. But in seaborn, the font size is mainly controlled through font scale sns.set_context("paper", font_scale=0.9). So it's hard for me to find the right font size except through trial and error. Is there a more efficient way to do this?

I also want to make sure the font size is consistent between different seaborn plots. But not all my seaborn plots have the same dimension, so it seems like using the same font_scale on all the plots does not necessarily create the same font size across these different plots?

I've attached my code below. I appreciate any comments on how to format the plot for a two column academic paper. My goal is to be able to control the size of the figure without distorting the font size or the plot. I use Latex to write my paper.

# Seaborn setting                                                                                                                                               sns.set(style='whitegrid', rc={"grid.linewidth": 0.1}) sns.set_context("paper", font_scale=0.9)                                                   plt.figure(figsize=(3.1, 3)) # Two column paper. Each column is about 3.15 inch wide.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  color = sns.color_palette("Set2", 6)  # Create a box plot for my data                                                       splot = sns.boxplot(data=df, palette=color, whis=np.inf,                                       width=0.5, linewidth = 0.7)  # Labels and clean up on the plot                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               splot.set_ylabel('Normalized WS')                                                      plt.xticks(rotation=90)                                                                plt.tight_layout()                                                                     splot.yaxis.grid(True, clip_on=False)                                                  sns.despine(left=True, bottom=True)                                                    plt.savefig('test.pdf', bbox_inches='tight')                                           

Answer 1

You are right. This is a badly documented issue. But you can change the font size parameter (by opposition to font scale) directly after building the plot. Check the following example:

import seaborn as sns tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")  b = sns.boxplot(x=tips["total_bill"]) b.axes.set_title("Title",fontsize=50) b.set_xlabel("X Label",fontsize=30) b.set_ylabel("Y Label",fontsize=20) b.tick_params(labelsize=5) sns.plt.show() 

, which results in this:

To make it consistent in between plots I think you just need to make sure the DPI is the same. By the way it' also a possibility to customize a bit the rc dictionaries since "font.size" parameter exists but I'm not too sure how to do that.

NOTE: And also I don't really understand why they changed the name of the font size variables for axis labels and ticks. Seems a bit un-intuitive.

Answer 2

It is all but satisfying, isn't it? The easiest way I have found to specify when setting the context, e.g.:

sns.set_context("paper", rc={"font.size":8,"axes.titlesize":8,"axes.labelsize":5})    

This should take care of 90% of standard plotting usage. If you want ticklabels smaller than axes labels, set the 'axes.labelsize' to the smaller (ticklabel) value and specify axis labels (or other custom elements) manually, e.g.:

axs.set_ylabel('mylabel',size=6) 

you could define it as a function and load it in your scripts so you don't have to remember your standard numbers, or call it every time.

def set_pubfig:     sns.set_context("paper", rc={"font.size":8,"axes.titlesize":8,"axes.labelsize":5})    

Of course you can use configuration files, but I guess the whole idea is to have a simple, straightforward method, which is why the above works well.

Note: If you specify these numbers, specifying font_scale in sns.set_context is ignored for all specified font elements, even if you set it.