Figure labels: suptitle, supxlabel, supylabel

Each axes can have a title (or actually three - one each with loc "left", "center", and "right"), but is sometimes desirable to give a whole figure (or SubFigure) an overall title, using FigureBase.suptitle.

We can also add figure-level x- and y-labels using FigureBase.supxlabel and FigureBase.supylabel.

from matplotlib.cbook import get_sample_data
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import numpy as np


x = np.linspace(0.0, 5.0, 501)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, constrained_layout=True, sharey=True)
ax1.plot(x, np.cos(6*x) * np.exp(-x))
ax1.set_title('damped')
ax1.set_xlabel('time (s)')
ax1.set_ylabel('amplitude')

ax2.plot(x, np.cos(6*x))
ax2.set_xlabel('time (s)')
ax2.set_title('undamped')

fig.suptitle('Different types of oscillations', fontsize=16)

Text(0.5, 0.99131875, 'Different types of oscillations')

A global x- or y-label can be set using the FigureBase.supxlabel and FigureBase.supylabel methods.

fig, axs = plt.subplots(3, 5, figsize=(8, 5), constrained_layout=True,
                        sharex=True, sharey=True)

fname = get_sample_data('percent_bachelors_degrees_women_usa.csv',
                        asfileobj=False)
gender_degree_data = np.genfromtxt(fname, delimiter=',', names=True)

majors = ['Health Professions', 'Public Administration', 'Education',
          'Psychology', 'Foreign Languages', 'English',
          'Art and Performance', 'Biology',
          'Agriculture', 'Business',
          'Math and Statistics', 'Architecture', 'Physical Sciences',
          'Computer Science', 'Engineering']

for nn, ax in enumerate(axs.flat):
    ax.set_xlim(1969.5, 2011.1)
    column = majors[nn]
    column_rec_name = column.replace('\n', '_').replace(' ', '_')

    line, = ax.plot('Year', column_rec_name, data=gender_degree_data,
                    lw=2.5)
    ax.set_title(column, fontsize='small', loc='left')
    ax.set_ylim([0, 100])
    ax.grid()
fig.supxlabel('Year')
fig.supylabel('Percent Degrees Awarded To Women')

plt.show()