[Matplotlib-users] Distance between axis and axis label

[Christian D. O. <chr...@gm...>]

Hi,

I am a new user of matplotlib (0.82; python 2.3.5).  So far I have
used supermongo (sic!) to produce figures for physics journal articles
and talks.  I am trying to get up to speed with matplotlib to do the
same kind of plots with an open source package.

For talks I like to prepare eps figures which I embed in my latex-based
slides. For slides, huge font sizes are a must, hence I like to use
large fonts for tick mark labels and axis labels. My problem: For the
axis labels, matplolib (or the PS backend?) is apparently not
adjusting (or rather: under-adjusting) the distance between axis and
axis label.

Is there a way to adjust the distance between an axis and its label?
If not, then where in the code is the distance calculated, scaled and
set? I have dug through the code, but could not find it due
to lack of object-oriented programming experience, I guess.

Here is an example of what I mean. The x-axis labels comes out
sort of okay, but the y-axis label is to close to the y axis.

#!/usr/bin/python
from pylab import *
from matplotlib import rcParams

plot([1,2,3,4], [1,4,9,16], 'ro')
xlabel("something",size=3D30)
ylabel("something else",size=3D30)
xlabels =3D getp(gca(), 'xticklabels')
setp(xlabels, size=3D25)
ylabels =3D getp(gca(), 'yticklabels')
setp(ylabels, size=3D25)
savefig("testplot.eps")

Note that playing around with 'axes' did not help - it has
no influence on the distance between labels and axes.

Help & comments much appreciated! Thanks!

 - Christian