[Matplotlib-users] scaling date ticking

[Thanos P. <pt...@gm...>]

Hello list,

I am plotting some time series data, and the ranges vary dramatically. I
cannot find a way to configure the major and minor ticking (hours and days
respectively) to scale automatically: if the range is too large, put a tick
every 8 hours instead of one, or even place a minor day tick every week and
dont do any hour ticking.

    ax.plot_date(date2num(times),points,'-',color="blue")

    days = DayLocator()
    daysFmt = DateFormatter('%d/%m')
    ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(days)
    ax.xaxis.set_minor_formatter(daysFmt)
    hours = HourLocator()
    hours.autoscale()
    hoursFmt = DateFormatter('%H')
    ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(hours)
    ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(hoursFmt)

    for tick in ax.xaxis.get_minor_ticks():
        tick.set_pad(13)

The pad trick is a cool answer I got in a previous post.