Customizing grids, ticks, and axes

Lines of grids, ticks, and axes help us to visually locate and measure the data values. Their distribution and style determine whether they make good visual aids for the plot or clutter the figure. We will demonstrate the basic methods here.

Grids

Sometimes it may not be easy to tell the coordinates of any point in the plot. Grid lines extend from axis tick marks and help us estimate the value at a certain position.

Adding grids

Grids can be added by calling pyplot.grid(). By default, grid lines will be added at major tick marks. As in other line features, pyplot.grid() takes in parameters such as linewidth (lw), linestyle (ls), and color (c):

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Prepare 100 evenly spaced numbers from 0 to 200
evens = np.linspace(0,200,100)

# Plot a square curve
plt.plot(evens,evens**2,label = 'x^2')

# Adding grid lines
plt.grid()

plt.legend()
plt.show()

Here you see the default grid lines extending from axis ticks:

In the...