Question

Matplotlib newbie here.

I have the following code:

from pylab import figure, show
import numpy

fig = figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

plot_data=[1.7,1.7,1.7,1.54,1.52]

xdata = range(len(plot_data))

labels = ["2009-June","2009-Dec","2010-June","2010-Dec","2011-June"]

ax.plot(xdata,plot_data,"b-")

ax.set_xticks(range(len(labels)))
ax.set_xticklabels(labels)

ax.set_yticks([1.4,1.6,1.8])

fig.canvas.draw()

show()

When you run that code, the resulting chart has a run-in with the first tick label (2009-June) and the origin. How can I get the graph to move over to make that more readable? I tried to put dummy data in, but then Matplotlib (correctly) treats that as data.

Answer 1

add two limits to the x and y axes to shift the tick labels a bit.

# grow the y axis down by 0.05
ax.set_ylim(1.35, 1.8)
# expand the x axis by 0.5 at two ends
ax.set_xlim(-0.5, len(labels)-0.5)

the result is