[Matplotlib-users] tick-marks feature request

[Darren D. <dd...@co...>]

Hi All,

My research group submitted a paper for publication in a journal, and 
one of the requested changes was having the tick-marks formatted like 
$1x10^{-4}$ (for the latex-ers out there) rather than 1e-4, which was 
considered an unnecessary use of mathematical jargon. I wasn't the lead 
author on this particular paper, and therefore the plots were not 
created using Python and MPL. But I think this is a pretty standard 
formatting requirement in the scientific community. Would the creators 
of Matplotlib consider an option to format the ticks like this (does 
this capability exist and I havent found it yet)?

In Matlab, when the tick labels require scientific notation, only the 
decimal component is listed in each tick label, and the exponential part 
is printed at the end of the axis. In Igor, the exponential part can be 
included in the y-axis label. Finally, one problem with formatting tick 
labels is how to deal with data spanning small ranges, but with large 
offsets, like array(range(10))+1e10. Maybe there is an interest in 
removing the offset from each tick label, and including it elsewhere in 
the figure? Then again, maybe that's getting too complicated.

Is this attractive to the Matplotlib Gurus and Users? If so, is it 
something I could work on, or would it be best left to the masters?

Darren