Matplotlib: how to adjust space between legend markers and labels?

Question

I want to adjust space between legend markers and labels. Sometime the space is too much as default. Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

legend() has a kwarg in called handletextpad which will do what you are looking for. By default, this is set to 0.8. From the docs:

handletextpad : float or None

The pad between the legend handle and text. Measured in font-size units.

Default is None which will take the value from the legend.handletextpad rcParam.

So when you call legend, add that kwarg, and experiment with the value. Something like:

ax.legend(handletextpad=0.1) 

Consider the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(ncols=2)  ax1.plot(range(5), 'ro', label='handletextpad=0.8') ax2.plot(range(5), 'bo', label='handletextpad=0.1')  ax1.legend() ax2.legend(handletextpad=0.1)  plt.show()