["python","matplotlib","axis-labels"]
Aligning rotated xticklabels with their respective xticks

Check the x axis of the figure below. How can I move the labels a bit to the left so that they align with their respective ticks? I'm rotating the labels using: ax.set_xticks(xlabels_positions) ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=45) But, as you can see, the rotation is centered on the middle of the text labels. Which makes it look like they are shifted to the right. I've tried using this instead: ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=45, rotation_mode="anchor") ... but it doesn't do what I wished for. And "anchor" seems to be the only value allowed for the rotation_mode parameter.
You can set the horizontal alignment of ticklabels, see the example below. If you imagine a rectangular box around the rotated label, which side of the rectangle do you want to be aligned with the tickpoint? Given your description, you want: ha='right' n=5 x = np.arange(n) y = np.sin(np.linspace(-3,3,n)) xlabels = ['Ticklabel %i' % i for i in range(n)] fig, axs = plt.subplots(1,3, figsize=(12,3)) ha = ['right', 'center', 'left'] for n, ax in enumerate(axs): ax.plot(x,y, 'o-') ax.set_title(ha[n]) ax.set_xticks(x) ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, rotation=40, ha=ha[n])