rotating xticks causes the ticks partially hidden in matplotlib

Question

I am creating a plot with names on x axis and time values(minutes) on y axis.The names on x axis are like

 ['cooking']18:15:27 ,['study']18:09:19,['travel']18:21:34` etc ..

where as the y values are 5,1,1 etc.I have given xlabel as 'categories' and ylabel as 'durations in minutes'.

Since the xticks were strings of some length,I decided to rotate them by 90 to avoid overlapping.Now ,the ticks are partially hidden and the xlabel has disappeared. Is there some way I can make the whole plot accommodate everything..?

thanks

mark

here is the code snippet

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
...
figure = plt.figure()
barwidth = 0.25
ystep = 10
plt.grid(True)
plt.xlabel('categories')
plt.ylabel('durations in  minutes')
plt.title('durations for categories-created at :'+now)
plt.bar(xdata, ydata, width=barwidth,align='center')
plt.xticks(xdata,catnames,rotation=90)
plt.yticks(range(0,maxduration+ystep,ystep))
plt.xlim([min(xdata) - 0.5, max(xdata) + 0.5])
plt.ylim(0,max(ydata)+ystep)
figure.savefig("myplot.png",format="png")

Answer 1

One good option is to rotate the tick labels.

In your specific case, you might find it convenient to use figure.autofmt_xdate() (Which will rotate the x-axis labels among other things).

Alternatively, you could do plt.setp(plt.xticks()[1], rotation=30) (or various other ways of doing the same thing).

Also, as a several year later edit, with recent versions of matplotlib, you can call fig.tight_layout() to resize things to fit the labels inside the figure, as @elgehelge notes below.

Answer 2

plt.tight_layout()

But be sure to add this command after plt.plot() or plt.bar()