Question

Is it possible to take:

hello world 12345

as an x-tick label (already being displayed vertically) and turn it into this:

hello world
12345

which is an x-tick label with (rotated) two columns?

Answer 1

You could format the text using the textwrap module from the standard library:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import textwrap

mu, sigma=100, 15
N=4
x=mu + sigma*np.random.randn(N)
plt.bar(range(N), x,  align='center')
labels=[
    'hello world 12345',
    'another long one',
    'what happened to pithy',
    'yada yada',
    ]
labels=[textwrap.fill(text,15) for text in labels]

plt.xticks(range(N), labels)
plt.show()