I am trying to customise a colorbar on my matpllotlib contourf plots. Whilst I am able to use scientific notation I am trying to change the base of the notation - essentially so that my ticks would be in the range of (-100,100) rather than (-10,10).
For example, this produces a simple plot...
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
z = (np.random.random((10,10)) - 0.5) * 0.2
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
plot = ax.contourf(z)
cbar = fig.colorbar(plot)
cbar.formatter.set_powerlimits((0, 0))
cbar.update_ticks()
plt.show()
like so:
However, I would like the label above the colorbar to be 1e-2 and the numbers to range from -10 to 10.
How would I go about this?
A possible solution can be to subclass the ScalarFormatter
and fix the order of magnitude as in this question: Set scientific notation with fixed exponent and significant digits for multiple subplots
You would then call this formatter with the order of magnitude as the argument order
, OOMFormatter(-2, mathText=False)
. mathText
is set to false to obtain the notation from the question, i.e.
while setting it to True, would give .
You can then set the formatter to the colorbar via the colorbar's format
argument.
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(0)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker
class OOMFormatter(matplotlib.ticker.ScalarFormatter):
def __init__(self, order=0, fformat="%1.1f", offset=True, mathText=True):
self.oom = order
self.fformat = fformat
matplotlib.ticker.ScalarFormatter.__init__(self,useOffset=offset,useMathText=mathText)
def _set_orderOfMagnitude(self, nothing):
self.orderOfMagnitude = self.oom
def _set_format(self, vmin, vmax):
self.format = self.fformat
if self._useMathText:
self.format = '$%s$' % matplotlib.ticker._mathdefault(self.format)
z = (np.random.random((10,10)) - 0.5) * 0.2
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
plot = ax.contourf(z)
cbar = fig.colorbar(plot, format=OOMFormatter(-2, mathText=False))
plt.show()
Similar to what @ImportanceOfBeingErnes described, you could use a FuncFormatter
(docs) to which you just pass a function to determine the tick labels. This removes the auto generation of the 1e-2
header for your colorbar, but I imagine you can manually add that back in (I had trouble doing it, though was able to add it on the side). Using a FuncFormatter
, you can just generate string tick values which has the advantage of not having to accept the way python thinks a number should be displayed.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as tk
z = (np.random.random((10,10)) - 0.5) * 0.2
levels = list(np.linspace(-.1,.1,9))
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
plot = ax.contourf(z, levels=levels)
def my_func(x, pos):
label = levels[pos]
return str(label*100)
fmt1 = tk.FuncFormatter(my_func)
cbar = fig.colorbar(plot, format=fmt1)
cbar.set_label("1e-2")
plt.show()
This will generate a plot which looks like this.