How do I stagger or offset x-axis labels in Matplotlib?

Question

I was wondering if there is an easy way to offset x-axis labels in a way similar to the attached image.

Answer 1

You can loop through your x axis ticks and increase the pad for every other tick so that they are lower than the other ticks. A minimal example would be:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.plot([1,2,3,4,5])

ax.set_xticks([1,2,3,4,5])
ax.set_xticklabels(["A","B","C","D","E",])

# [1::2] means start from the second element in the list and get every other element
for tick in ax.xaxis.get_major_ticks()[1::2]:
    tick.set_pad(15)

plt.show()