Matplotlib with many text lablels decluttered.

readme.md

for use in VSCode Jupyter notebooks / lab automatically adjust which labels are shown

plot.py

%matplotlib widget
from matplotlib import ticker
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 2.5))

# list of desciptions for the x-axis
x = mi_list.np_array["description"]
x = [f'Step-{xx}' for xx in np.arange(100)]

def format_x_label(x_value, tick_pos):
    "formatter function to retrieve the label for the x-axis based onthe x_value that is passed in."
    try:
        idx = int(x_value) # convert float to int
        return x[idx] # return the label from the list
    except IndexError:
        return str(x_value) #  out of range

# fake data for the y-axis
y = np.random.randint(0, 100, len(x))
ax.plot(np.arange(len(x)), y)

ax.set_title("x converted to numbers --> lookup label in list[label] via formatter")
# nbins sets the number of major-ticks on the x-axis, integers only as these are used as index into the list
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.MaxNLocator( nbins="auto", integer=True))
# set the formatter function for the x-axis to replace the numbers with the labels
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(format_x_label)

# add minor ticks - optional but gives a hint that there are more datapoint between the major ticks
ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(ticker.AutoMinorLocator())

for label in ax.get_xticklabels():
    label.set_horizontalalignment("left")
    label.set_rotation(-10)
    label.set_fontsize("small")