How do you just show the text label in plot legend? (e.g. remove a label's line in the legend)

At that point, it's arguably easier to just use annotate.

For example:

import numpy as npimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltdata = np.random.normal(0, 1, 1000).cumsum()fig, ax = plt.subplots()ax.plot(data)ax.annotate('Label', xy=(-12, -12), xycoords='axes points',            size=14, ha='right', va='top',            bbox=dict(boxstyle='round', fc='w'))plt.show()

However, if you did want to use legend, here's how you'd do it. You'll need to explicitly hide the legend handles in addition to setting their size to 0 and removing their padding.

import numpy as npimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltdata = np.random.normal(0, 1, 1000).cumsum()fig, ax = plt.subplots()ax.plot(data, label='Label')leg = ax.legend(handlelength=0, handletextpad=0, fancybox=True)for item in leg.legendHandles:    item.set_visible(False)plt.show()

You can just set the handletextpad and handlelength in the legend via the legend_handler as shown below:

import matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport numpy as np# Plot up a generic set of linesx = np.arange( 3 )for i in x:    plt.plot( i*x, x, label='label'+str(i), lw=5 )# Add a legend # (with a negative gap between line and text, and set "handle" (line) length to 0)legend = plt.legend(handletextpad=-2.0, handlelength=0)

Detail on handletextpad and handlelength is in documentation (linked here, & copied below):

handletextpad : float or None

The pad between the legend handle and text. Measured in font-size units. Default is None, which will take the value from rcParams["legend.handletextpad"].

handlelength : float or None

The length of the legend handles. Measured in font-size units. Default is None, which will take the value from rcParams["legend.handlelength"].

With the above code:

With a few extra lines the labels can have the same color as their line. just use .set_color() via legend.get_texts().

# Now color the legend labels the same as the linescolor_l = ['blue', 'orange', 'green']for n, text in enumerate( legend.texts ):    print( n, text)    text.set_color( color_l[n] )

Just calling plt.legend() gives:

I found another much simpler solution - simply set the scale of the marker to zero in the legend properties:

plt.legend(markerscale=0)

This is particularly useful in scatter plots, when you don't want the marker to be visually mistaken for a true data point (or even outlier!).