Python Data Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

Defining axis lengths and limits

This recipe will demonstrate a variety of useful axis properties around limits and lengths that we can configure in matplotlib.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we want to fire up IPython:

$ ipython

After this, we need to import the plotting functions right away:

from matplotlib.pylab import *

How to do it...

Start experimenting with various properties of axes. Just calling an empty axis() function will return the default values for the axis:

In [1]: axis()
Out[1]: (0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0)

Note that if you are in interactive mode and are using a windowing backend, a figure with an empty axis will be displayed.

Here the values represent xmin, xmax, ymin, and ymax respectively. Similarly, we can set values for the x and y ...