[Matplotlib-users] changing the xtick/ytick pads for subplots?

[per f. <per...@gm...>]

hi all,

i am trying to adjust the space (padding) between the tickmarks on an
axes and the labels. usually, i can do this by setting
'xtick.major.pad' and 'xtick.minor.pad' (and same for y-axis) in
rcParams. however, when i try to do this with a figure made using the
"SubplotZero" function, it seems to only work for the y-axis and not
the x-axis for some reason -- here is an example:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('PDF')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import rc
rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
plt.rcParams['ps.useafm'] = True
rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
plt.rcParams['pdf.fonttype'] = 42
plt.rcParams['font.size'] = 10
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid.axislines import SubplotZero

def setup_axes(fig, labelpad=1, invisible=["bottom", "top", "right"]):
    plt.rcParams['ytick.major.pad'] = 2
    plt.rcParams['ytick.minor.pad'] = 2
    # Y ticks work, but X tick do not...
    plt.rcParams['xtick.major.pad'] = 0.01
    plt.rcParams['xtick.minor.pad'] = 0.01
    ax = SubplotZero(fig, 1, 1, 1)
    fig.add_subplot(ax)
    # make xzero axis (horizontal axis line through y=0) visible.
    ax.axis["xzero"].set_visible(True)
    # make other axis (bottom, top, right) invisible.
    for n in invisible:
        ax.axis[n].set_visible(False)
    return ax

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(5, 5), dpi=300)
setup_axes(fig, labelpad=2)
x = range(1, 11)
y = [5000, 900, 600, 500, 200, 110, 50, 20, 10, 5]
plt.plot(x, y)
ax = plt.gca()
plt.savefig('test.pdf')

i am seeing the ylabels get closer to the y-axis, but the x-axis seems
to have no effect. it seems to be related to SubplotZero since
otherwise in ordinary plots this works fine. any idea how this could
be fixed?

thanks very much for your help.