Using subplots

If you are reading this book from the start, you are probably familiar with the subplot class, a descendant of axes that lives on the regular grid of subplot instances. We are going to explain and demonstrate how to use subplots in advanced ways.

In this recipe we will be learning how to create custom subplot configurations on our plots.

Getting ready

The base class for subplots is matplotlib.axes.SubplotBase. These subplots are matplotlib.axes.Axes instances but provides helper methods for generating and manipulating a set of Axes within a figure.

There is a class matplotlib.figure.SubplotParams, which holds all the parameters for subplot. The dimensions are normalized to the width or height of the figure. As we already know, if we don't specify any custom values, they will be read from the rc parameters.

The scripting layer (matplotlib.pyplot) holds a few helper methods to manipulate subplots.

matplotlib.pyplot.subplots is used for the easy creation of common layouts of subplots...