Re: [Matplotlib-users] applying format to numbering

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Meesters," == Meesters, Christian <mee...@un...> writes:

    Meesters> Hi, It's me again ... I still do not find my way out of
    Meesters> the problem on how I can apply a format to the
    Meesters> numbering of an axis. I am using the WXAgg backend and
    Meesters> this is my code:


To apply a "default font" for the entire figure, you can use the rc
params -- see http://matplotlib.sf.net/.matplotlibrc, especially the
font.*, axes.* and tick.* settings

    from matplotlib import rc
    from pylab import figure, show

    rc('font', weight='bold', style='italics')
    rc('axes', labelsize=25)
    rc('tick', labelsize=14)

    fig = figure()
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
    ax.plot(range(10))
    ax.set_xlabel('hi')
    ax.set_ylabel('bye')
    ax.set_title('easy as 1-2-3')

    show()

You can also customize the default tick labels sizes individually.  I
already noted that for the xlabel, ylabel and title you can use
kwargs, eg

    ax.set_xlabel('hi', fontsize='smaller')

and so on.

For the tick labels, you will need to get a list of the tick label
Text instances you want to customize

  labels = ax.get_xticklabels()

You can call any of the text setter methods on these labels, which are
detailed here
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.text.html#Text

For example, you can set the fontsize or fontproperty with

for label in labels:
    label.set_fontsize(mysize)

for label in labels:
    label.set_fontproperties(fp)

A lot of the methods like set_fontsize are historical artifacts from
before we had font properties, and they just forward the call to the
property

If you want finer grained control over the major and minor ticks, or
different customizations for the top and bottom ticks (on the xaxis
the top ticks are normally off but you can turn them on) you can do
that too, but it is a little more work

  # ditto for get_minor_ticks
  ticks = ax.xaxis.get_major_ticks()
  majLabelsLower = [tick.label1 for tick in ticks]
  majLabelsUpper = [tick.label2 for tick in ticks]

and then call the setter methods on these as above.

Hope this helps,
JDH