Sorry, I forgot to use a sensible subject for the email!

Regards,
--Damon

On 12 Aug 2009, at 16:35, Damon McDougall wrote:

Hello all,

So I'm trying to use matplotlib's OO interface (so programming without using 'from pylab import *') and found this useful page:http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/leftwich_tut.txt after much googling.

My problem is that, in general, after producing a plot, I would open the .pdf produced to find lots of whitespace that I don't want. The reason I don't want the whitespace is that I want to include these figures in a latex document and I want to maximise space. I did some reading and from what I understand, Axes.get_tightbbox() is the correct tool to use to return a tight bounding box which I can then use to adjust the Axes limits. Here is the code I currently have:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib

fig_width_pt  = 483.69687                     # figure width in pt as returned by \showthe in LaTeX
inches_per_pt = 1.0/72.27
golden_ratio  = (np.sqrt(5) - 1.0) / 2.0
fig_width_in  = fig_width_pt * inches_per_pt  # figure width in inches
fig_height_in = fig_width_in * golden_ratio   # figure height in inches
fig_dims      = [fig_width_in, fig_height_in] # fig dims as a list

matplotlib.use('PDF')
matplotlib.rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Computer Modern Roman']})
matplotlib.rc('text', usetex=True)
matplotlib.rc('axes', labelsize=10)
matplotlib.rc('legend', fontsize=10)
matplotlib.rc('xtick', labelsize=10)
matplotlib.rc('ytick', labelsize=10)
matplotlib.rc('font', size=10)
matplotlib.rc('figure', figsize=fig_dims)

from matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf import FigureCanvasPdf as FigureCanvas
from matplotlib.figure import Figure
fig = Figure()
canvas = FigureCanvas(fig)
ax.hold(True)
ax.grid(True)
plot_means = ax.plot(means, 'b', label='$m_k$')
plot_vars = ax.plot(vars, 'g', label='$\sigma_k^2$')
plot_ictruth = ax.axhline(y = x_0, xmin = 0, xmax = numtimes, color='r', label='$x_0$')
ax.set_xlabel('$k$')
ax.legend(loc='upper right')
tightbox = ax.get_tightbbox()
canvas.print_pdf(a)

The problem here is that get_tightbbox() takes 2 arguments, namely self and renderer. My question is, what is a renderer and how do I instantiate/create one? After some reading I think it's something to do with maplotlib.backend_bases or something. Am I on the right track? After the call I want to adjust the Axes limits to the thing returned by get_tightbbox(), would ax.set_position(tightbox) do that here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
--Damon