I’m coming here from this question, where an annotation should be updated that uses both xy
and xytext
. It appears that, in order to update the annotation correctly, one needs to set the attribute .xy
of the annotation to set the position of the annotated point and to use the .set_position()
method of the annotation to set the position of the annotation. Setting the .xytext
attribute has no effect — somewhat confusing in my opinion. Below a complete example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.animation as animation
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.set_xlim([-1,1])
ax.set_ylim([-1,1])
L = 50
theta = np.linspace(0,2*np.pi,L)
r = np.ones_like(theta)
x = r*np.cos(theta)
y = r*np.sin(theta)
line, = ax.plot(1,0, 'ro')
annotation = ax.annotate(
'annotation', xy=(1,0), xytext=(-1,0),
arrowprops = {'arrowstyle': "->"}
)
def update(i):
new_x = x[i%L]
new_y = y[i%L]
line.set_data(new_x,new_y)
##annotation.xytext = (-new_x,-new_y) <-- does not work
annotation.set_position((-new_x,-new_y))
annotation.xy = (new_x,new_y)
return line, annotation
ani = animation.FuncAnimation(
fig, update, interval = 500, blit = False
)
plt.show()
The result looks something like this:
In case that versions matter, this code has been tested on Python 2.7 and 3.6 with matplotlib version 2.1.1, and in both cases setting .xytext
had no effect, while .set_position()
and .xy
worked as expected.