"figsize = " has different effect when plotting directly vs from dataframe

[Richard Stanton]

Plotting using plt.plot, I often increase the default figure size somewhat using the command

plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))

Sometimes I plot using the built-in pandas plotting function, e.g.,

df.plot(figsize=(10,6))

Both of these commands work, and both increase the default figure size, but the figures don’t come out the same size in the two cases. To get them roughly the same size, in the pandas plot I need to set fig size to something like (8.5,5). Why the difference in behavior?

[Paul Hobson]

This will be very difficult to diagnose without a complete, minimal, and working example that demonstrates the problem. Could you provide one?

-paul 

[Richard Stanton]

User error! I was using plt.tight_layout() in one case and not in the other.