Setting bar spacing in a matplotlib bar plot

I have a matplotlib.bar plot and I can't figure out how to space the bars further apa开发者_JS百科rt so the labels are readable.

Here is my code

import matplotlib  
matplotlib.use('Agg')  
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  
def makePlot(self, data, labels, title, fileName):  
    plt.bar(range(1,len(data)+1), data, align="center")  
    plt.title(title)  
    plt.xticks(range(1, len(labels)+1), labels)  
    plt.savefig(fileName)  
    plt.clf()

You can change the size of the figure by calling plt.figure(figsize=(x,y)) where x and y are the width and height in inches. That line must be before you call plt.bar.

Alternatively, you can make the label font smaller. You would do that by changing your call to xticks to plt.xticks(range(1, len(labels)+1), labels, size='small').

One more thing to try is to use the plt.xlim() function to manually set the limits of the x axis.