Automatically Position Text Box In Matplotlib

Answer :

Just use annotate and specify axis coordinates. For example, "upper left" would be:

plt.annotate('Something', xy=(0.05, 0.95), xycoords='axes fraction') 

You could also get fancier and specify a constant offset in points:

plt.annotate('Something', xy=(0, 1), xytext=(12, -12), va='top'              xycoords='axes fraction', textcoords='offset points') 

For more explanation see the examples here and the more detailed examples here.

I'm not sure if this was available when I originally posted the question but using the loc parameter can now actually be used. Below is an example:

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib.offsetbox import AnchoredText  # make some data x = np.arange(10) y = x  # set up figure and axes f, ax = plt.subplots(1,1)  # loc works the same as it does with figures (though best doesn't work) # pad=5 will increase the size of padding between the border and text # borderpad=5 will increase the distance between the border and the axes # frameon=False will remove the box around the text  anchored_text = AnchoredText("Test", loc=2) ax.plot(x,y) ax.add_artist(anchored_text)  plt.show() 

The question is quite old but as there is no general solution to the problem till now (2019) according to Add loc=best kwarg to pyplot.text(), I'm using legend() and the following workaround to obtain auto-placement for simple text boxes:

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.patches as mpl_patches  x = np.linspace(-1,1) fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.plot(x, x*x)  # create a list with two empty handles (or more if needed) handles = [mpl_patches.Rectangle((0, 0), 1, 1, fc="white", ec="white",                                   lw=0, alpha=0)] * 2  # create the corresponding number of labels (= the text you want to display) labels = [] labels.append("pi = {0:.4g}".format(np.pi)) labels.append("root(2) = {0:.4g}".format(np.sqrt(2)))  # create the legend, supressing the blank space of the empty line symbol and the # padding between symbol and label by setting handlelenght and handletextpad ax.legend(handles, labels, loc='best', fontsize='small',            fancybox=True, framealpha=0.7,            handlelength=0, handletextpad=0) plt.show() 

The general idea is to create a legend with a blank line symbol and to remove the resulting empty space afterwards. How to adjust the size of matplotlib legend box? helped me with the legend formatting.