How do I fit long title?

• matplotlib: Auto-wrapping text is the official answer from the matplotlib documentation
  • Review the Note for associated caveats.
• matplotlib: Text properties and layout are also useful
• It doesn't work to display an inline plot in Jupyter because of GitHub: Text wrapping doesn't seem to work in jupyter notebook #10869 unless you do this answer Matplotlib and Ipython-notebook: Displaying exactly the figure that will be saved
  • plt.savefig(...) seems to work properly with wrap

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [1,2,3]
y = [4,5,6]

# initialization:
fig, axes = plt.subplots(figsize=(8.0, 5.0))

# title:
myTitle = "Some really really long long long title I really really need - and just can't - just can't - make it any - simply any - shorter - at all."

# lines:
axes.plot(x, y)

# set title
axes.set_title(myTitle, loc='center', wrap=True)

plt.show()

• The following also works

plt.figure(figsize=(8, 5))

# title:
myTitle = "Some really really long long long title I really really need - and just can't - just can't - make it any - simply any - shorter - at all."

# lines:
plt.plot(x, y)

# set title
plt.title(myTitle, loc='center', wrap=True)

plt.show()

Note

• The following way of adding an axes is deprecated

# lines:
fig.add_subplot(111).plot(x, y)

# title:
myTitle = "Some really really long long long title I really really need - and just can't - just can't - make it any - simply any - shorter - at all."

fig.add_subplot(111).set_title(myTitle, loc='center', wrap=True)

MatplotlibDeprecationWarning: Adding an axes using the same arguments as a previous axes currently reuses the earlier instance. In a future version, a new instance will always be created and returned. Meanwhile, this warning can be suppressed, and the future behavior ensured, by passing a unique label to each axes instance.

Here's what I've finally used:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import matplotlib
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from textwrap import wrap

data = range(5)

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

ax.plot(data, data)

title = ax.set_title("\n".join(wrap("Some really really long long long title I really really need - and just can't - just can't - make it any - simply any - shorter - at all.", 60)))

fig.tight_layout()
title.set_y(1.05)
fig.subplots_adjust(top=0.8)

fig.savefig("1.png")

One way to do it is to simply change the font size of the title:

import pylab as plt

plt.rcParams["axes.titlesize"] = 8

myTitle = "Some really really long long long title I really really need - and just can't - just can't - make it any - simply any - shorter - at all."
plt.title(myTitle)
plt.show()

In the answer you linked are several other good solutions that involve adding newlines. There is even an automatic solution that resizes based off of the figure!

I preferred to adapt @Adobe's solution in this way:

plt.title("First Title\n%s" % "\n".join(wrap("Second Title", width=60)))