At the moment if I set matplotlib y axis ticklabels to scientific mode it gives me an exponent at the top of the y axis of the form 1e-5 I'd like to adjust this to read r'$\mathregular{10^{-5}}$' so that it prints out nicely. Here's my example code: # Create a figure and axis fig, ax = plt.subplots() # Plot 100 random points # the y values of which are very small ax.scatter(np.random.rand(100), np.random.rand(100)/100000.0) # Set the y limits appropriately ax.set_ylim(0, 1/100000.0) # Change the y ticklabel format to scientific format ax.ticklabel_format(axis='y', style='sci', scilimits=(-2, 2)) # Get the offset value offset = ax.yaxis.get_offset_text() # Print it out print '1st offset printout: {}'.format(offset) # Run plt.tight_layout() plt.tight_layout() # Print out offset again - you can see the value now! print '2nd offset printout: {}'.format(offset) # Change it to latex format offset.set_text(r'$\mathregular{10^{-5}}$') # Print it out print '3rd offset printout: {}'.format(offset) # Add some text to the middle of the figure just to # check that it isn't the latex format that's the problem ax.text(0.5, 0.5/100000.0, r'$\mathregular{10^{-2}}$') # And show the figure plt.show() My output looks like this: 1st offset printout: Text(0,0.5,u'') 2nd offset printout: Text(0,636.933,u'1e\u22125') 3rd offset printout: Text(0,636.933,u'$\\mathregular{10^{-5}}$') You can find the code and output figure here. There are two oddities: One is that I can't overwrite the 1e-5 at the top of the y axis (which is the goal), and the other is that I have to run plt.tight_layout() in order to even see that unicode value as the offset. Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong? Thank you EDIT: The original question didn't make clear that I'd like to automatically detect the exponent as is currently calculated by ticklabel_format. So instead of passing a set string to the offset text it should automatically detect that value and adjust the latex string accordingly. Continue reading...
