Question

Using matplotlib in Python I drew a 3D graph. When I rotate the graph I noticed that the axes labels swap automatically which does not look interesting or helping to me. In fact it disturbs my focusing on the purpose of rotation which is to explore visually the presented data.

Q: How to disable auto-swapping axes labels while rotating in matplotlib?

Answer 1

I grabbed some ideas from SO, examined many and finally developed the following solution. It simply works.

from __future__ import division
import scipy as sp
import mpl_toolkits.mplot3d as a3d
import pylab as pl

nan = sp.nan

def axesoff():
    box = [[-1,1,1,-1,-1,1,1,-1,-1,-1,nan,1,1,nan,1,1,nan,-1,-1],
           [-1,-1,-1,-1,1,1,1,1,-1,-1,nan,-1,1,nan,1,-1,nan,1,1],
           [-1,-1,1,1,1,1,-1,-1,-1,1,nan,-1,-1,nan,1,1,nan,-1,1]]
    ax3.plot(*box,color='k')
    for axis in (ax3.w_xaxis,ax3.w_yaxis,ax3.w_zaxis):
        for obj in axis.get_ticklines(): obj.set_visible(False)
        axis.set_ticklabels('')
        axis.line.set_visible(False)
        axis.pane.set_visible(False)
    ax3.grid(False)
    ax3.axis('equal')

#------here we go
x,y,z = sp.random.uniform(low=-1,high=1,size=(3,1000))
c = (x+1)+(y+1)+(z+1)
s = c*10
ax3 = a3d.Axes3D(pl.figure())
ax3.scatter(x,y,z,lw=0,s=s,c=c,alpha=0.5)

axesoff()

pl.show()