Increase tick label font size in seaborn

• This answer will address setting x or y ticklabel size independently.
• sns.set(font_scale=2) from p-robot will set all the figure fonts.
• The answer from Kabir Ahuja works because y-labels position is being used as the text.
  • If there are y-labels text, that solution will not work.
• There are a number of ways to get ticks and labels:
  • plt.xticks()
  • ax.get_xticklabels()
  • ax.get_xticks()
• Tested in python 3.10, matplotlib 3.5.2, seaborn 0.12.0

Given the following plot

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# data
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

# plot figure
plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))
p = sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips)

# get label text
_, ylabels = plt.yticks()
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()
plt.show()

Setting the y-axis doesn't work

# plot figure
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6))
sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips, ax=ax)

print(ax.get_xticks())
print(ax.get_yticks())
print('\n')
print(ax.get_xticklabels())
print(ax.get_yticklabels())
print('\n')
print(plt.xticks())
print(plt.yticks())
print('\n')

# get label text
yticks, ylabels = plt.yticks()
xticks, xlabels = plt.xticks()

print(ylabels)

print(yticks)

# there is no text label
print(ylabels[0].get_text())

# there are text labels on the x-axis
print(xlabels)

# the answer from Kabir Ahuja works because of this
print(ax.get_yticks())

# set the x-axis ticklabel size
ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=5)

# in this case, the following won't work because the text is ''
# this is what to do if the there are text labels
ax.set_yticklabels(ylabels, size=15)

plt.show()

print output

[0 1 2 3]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]

[Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')]
[Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')]

(array([0, 1, 2, 3]), [Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')])
(array([-10.,   0.,  10.,  20.,  30.,  40.,  50.,  60.,  70.]), [Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')])

[Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]
← empty string from ylabels[0].get_text()
[Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]

plot

• There are no ytick labels because
  • y_text = [y.get_text() for y in ylabels] = ['', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '']

To set yticklabel size

# use
p.set_yticklabels(p.get_yticks(), size=15)

# or
_, ylabels = plt.yticks()
p.set_yticklabels(ylabels, size=15)

To set xticklabel size

# use
p.set_xticklabels(p.get_xticks(), size=15)

# or
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()
p.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=15)

This works

# plot figure
fig , ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6))
sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips, ax=ax)

# get label text
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()

# set the x-labels with
ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=5)

# prevents: UserWarning: FixedFormatter should only be used together with FixedLocator
ax.set_yticks(ax.get_yticks()[1:])
# set the y-labels with
_ = ax.set_yticklabels(ax.get_yticks(), size=5)

Expanding on the accepted answer, if you want to just rescale the font size of the tick labels without scaling other labels by the same amount, you can try this:

import pandas as pd, numpy as np, seaborn as sns
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# Generate data
df = pd.DataFrame({"Draughts": np.random.randn(100)})

# Plot using seaborn
b = sns.violinplot(y = "Draughts", data = df)
b.set_yticklabels(b.get_yticks(), size = 15)

plt.show()

The answer from here makes fonts larger in seaborn ...

import pandas as pd, numpy as np, seaborn as sns
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# Generate data
df = pd.DataFrame({"Draughts": np.random.randn(100)})

# Plot using seaborn
sns.set(font_scale = 2)
b = sns.violinplot(y = "Draughts", data = df)
plt.show()