[python] Adjust the distance between the axis of the graph and the axis label

Overview

When drawing a graph with matplotlib, you may want to adjust the distance between the axis and the axis label.

Personally, I feel that the axis and axis label are too close, especially in the seaborn heatmap.

Here's how to deal with such cases.

Method

You can adjust the distance between the axes by specifying the labelpad as an argument of xlabel ().

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

x=np.random.rand(5, 5)

fig, ax=plt.subplots()
sns.heatmap(x)
ax.set_xlabel('x label', fontsize=14, labelpad=20)
ax.set_ylabel('y label', fontsize=14, labelpad=20)
plt.show()

A comparison of labelpad = 0 and labelpad = 20 is shown in the figure below.