Cropping text on matplotlib plot

Question

I am making a plot and I want the text to crop at the edge. Right now it hangs over the edge, which is great for readability, but not what I actually want.

Here's a toy version of what I'm doing:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

ax.scatter(np.random.random(10), np.random.random(10))
ax.text(0.8, 0.5, "a rather long string")

plt.show()

Just to be clear, I want to crop my text element, but not anything else — e.g. I want to leave the 0.9 in the x-axis alone.

Answer 1

You should set a clipbox for the text as described in the documentation:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

ax.scatter(np.random.random(10), np.random.random(10))
ax.text(0.8, 0.5, "a rather long string",
        clip_box=ax.clipbox, clip_on=True)
ax.set_xlim(0, 1)

plt.show()

This results in