Question

When I try to do a plot against a range with big enough numbers I get an axis with relative shift for all the ticks. For example:

plot([1000, 1001, 1002], [1, 2, 3])

I get these ticks on axis of abscissas:

0.0     0.5     1.0     1.5     2.0
                               +1e3

The question is how to remove +1e3 and get just:

1000.0  1000.5  1001.0  1001.5  1002.0

Answer 1

plot([1000, 1001, 1002], [1, 2, 3])
gca().get_xaxis().get_major_formatter().set_useOffset(False)
draw()

This grabs the current axes, gets the x-axis axis object and then the major formatter object and sets useOffset to false (doc).

In newer versions (1.4+) of matplotlib the default behavior can be changed via the axes.formatter.useoffset rcparam.