How to change the font size on a matplotlib plot

Question

How does one change the font size for all elements (ticks, labels, title) on a matplotlib plot?

I know how to change the tick label sizes, this is done with:

import matplotlib  matplotlib.rc('xtick', labelsize=20)  matplotlib.rc('ytick', labelsize=20)  

But how does one change the rest?

Answer 1

From the matplotlib documentation,

font = {'family' : 'normal',         'weight' : 'bold',         'size'   : 22}  matplotlib.rc('font', **font) 

This sets the font of all items to the font specified by the kwargs object, font.

Alternatively, you could also use the rcParams update method as suggested in this answer:

matplotlib.rcParams.update({'font.size': 22}) 

or

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.rcParams.update({'font.size': 22}) 

You can find a full list of available properties on the Customizing matplotlib page.

Answer 2

If you are a control freak like me, you may want to explicitly set all your font sizes:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  SMALL_SIZE = 8 MEDIUM_SIZE = 10 BIGGER_SIZE = 12  plt.rc('font', size=SMALL_SIZE)          # controls default text sizes plt.rc('axes', titlesize=SMALL_SIZE)     # fontsize of the axes title plt.rc('axes', labelsize=MEDIUM_SIZE)    # fontsize of the x and y labels plt.rc('xtick', labelsize=SMALL_SIZE)    # fontsize of the tick labels plt.rc('ytick', labelsize=SMALL_SIZE)    # fontsize of the tick labels plt.rc('legend', fontsize=SMALL_SIZE)    # legend fontsize plt.rc('figure', titlesize=BIGGER_SIZE)  # fontsize of the figure title 

Note that you can also set the sizes calling the rc method on matplotlib:

import matplotlib  SMALL_SIZE = 8 matplotlib.rc('font', size=SMALL_SIZE) matplotlib.rc('axes', titlesize=SMALL_SIZE)  # and so on ...