[Matplotlib-users] how to prevent colorbar from taking space from axes

[Slavin, J. <js...@cf...>]

Hi,

I'm trying to make a plot with four panes (2x2).  The two on top are
images, created with pcolormesh, while the ones on the bottom are line
plots.  I'd like to the axes to line up -- which they do -- but when I add
a colorbar to the top right, it steals space from the image plot.  I only
need one colorbar since the two images are forced to have the same
scaling.  Can anyone tell me how to insert the colorbar on the top right
without it taking space from the top right image -- or force the space to
be taken from the horizontal space of all the plots so the shapes are
uniform?  I've tried several approaches including using make_axes_locatable
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 with no success.  I must admit that I don't
really understand what make_axes_locatable does, so it may be entirely the
wrong thing to use.  On the other hand, not using it, i.e. just using
plt.colorbar or fig.colorbar seems to do essentially the same thing, steal
space from the axes.  The basics of the plot are like this:

x = np.arange(20.)
xc = (x[:-1] + x[1:])/2.
y = np.arange(15.)
xx,yy = np.meshgrid(x,y)
z1 = np.random.randn(14,19)
z2 = np.random.randn(14,19)

fig,ax = plt.subplots(2,2)
pc = ax[0,0].pcolormesh(x,y,z1)
ax[1,0].plot(xc,z1[0,:])
ax[0,1].pcolormesh(x,y,z2)
ax[1,1].plot(xc,z2[0,:])
cb = plt.colorbar(pc, ax=ax[0,1])
plt.show()

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Jon
-- 
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Jonathan D. Slavin                 Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
js...@cf...       60 Garden Street, MS 83
phone: (617) 496-7981       Cambridge, MA 02138-1516
fax: (617) 496-7577            USA
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