Hi, two bar plot questions from my side: - Is it
> possible to draw bar plots without surronding lines?
> How? - I'd like to draw the bars a bit transparent,
> but 'alpha' does not work. Is there an other way?
The trick is to make the edge and face colors the same. Setting the
linewidth to 0 can also help but doesn't work on every backend. You
can set alpha as on any Artist
rects = bar([1,2,3], [4,5,6])
setp(rects, facecolor='b', edgecolor='b', linewidth=0, alpha=0.5)
Call getp(anyartist) on any Artist instance to see what
properties are settable and what their current values are.
Should help 
JDH