Number of digits in xticks for Plots.jl

General Usage
1

Hi all-

I have a crowding issue on the scale of my x-axis because too many digits are displayed. I tried to round the values I pass to xticks, but that did not help. Is there any way to control the number of digits that are display?

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2

What command are you currently using to plot? xticks can take a range with a step, like this: 1:2:10 which will return ticks at these locations:

julia> collect(1:2:10)
5-element Array{Int64,1}:
 1
 3
 5
 7
 9
3

I am passing a step range like this: round.(range(…),digits =2). I am having trouble reproducing the problem with a minimum working example. It must depend on some combination of factors that I do not fully understand.

This works:

using Plots,Distributions
Parms = [[100.0,15.0],[0.0,.005],[10.0,5.0],[10,.01]]
p = plot(layout=4)
for (i,parms) in enumerate(Parms)
    x = rand(Normal(parms...),100)
    y = rand(Normal(parms...),100)
    lb = minimum(x); ub = maximum(x)
    ticks = round.(range(lb,stop=ub,length = 4),digits=2)
    scatter!(p,x,y,subplot=i,xticks=ticks)
end
display(p)

But as you can see from my more complicated example, sometimes it does not work. I was able to work around this particular problem by changing the size of the plot. I will repost if I can reproduce with something that I can share.

Example
Example825×551 31.1 KB

1 Like
4

I just want to clarify that my example is basically the same except that I am using simulated data.

5

Ah, are you talking about the example in the upper right? You can reduce the fontsize for the axis labels (using e.g. xtickfont = font(20, "Courier")). I’m not quite sure, but I think there was an option to rotate the tick labeling too, but I can’t recall how its called right now.

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6

The upper left and lower right subplots are problematic because they should have two decimals. The upper right is overcrowded, but conforms to the intended configuration. I guess this isn’t a general problem, but hopefully I can identify the parameters that produce it.

Thanks for the ideas nonetheless.

7

You can convert the ticks to strings with the format you want using Printf and then use the strings as tick labels. For example:

using Plots, Printf
x = rand(10); y = rand(10);
ticks = collect(0:0.2:1)
ticklabels = [ @sprintf("%5.1f",x) for x in ticks ]
plot(x,y)
plot!(xticks=(ticks,ticklabels))

which will give you the number of decimal places defined by printf

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