Matplotlib: How to prevent overlapping labels in a stacked bar chart with large datasets?
I'm testing a new approach and I need some guidance on After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm creating a stacked bar chart using Matplotlib to visualize the sales data for multiple products over several years. The dataset is quite large, which results in many bars stacked on top of each other, and the labels for each segment are overlapping, making it hard to read. Here’s a snippet of my code: ```python import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np # Sample data labels = ['Product A', 'Product B', 'Product C'] years = [2019, 2020, 2021] # Random sales data np.random.seed(0) data = np.random.randint(1, 100, size=(len(years), len(labels))) # Create a stacked bar chart fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.bar(years, data[:, 0], label=labels[0]) ax.bar(years, data[:, 1], bottom=data[:, 0], label=labels[1]) ax.bar(years, data[:, 2], bottom=data[:, 0] + data[:, 1], label=labels[2]) # Adding labels for i in range(len(years)): for j in range(len(labels)): ax.text(years[i], np.sum(data[i, :j+1]), str(data[i, j]), ha='center', va='center') ax.legend() plt.show() ``` I've tried adjusting the `ha` and `va` parameters of the `text` function to center the labels, but it hasn’t resolved the issue because the values stack on top of each other, leading to a cluttered look. I'm considering using smaller font sizes or rotating the labels, but I'm not sure how to implement that effectively. Is there a way to dynamically adjust the label positions or format them differently to avoid overlap? Any best practices for handling this in such scenarios would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger service I'm building. How would you solve this? Could someone point me to the right documentation? For reference, this is a production microservice. Is this even possible? This issue appeared after updating to Python 3.10. Cheers for any assistance!