One way to avoid having the minor ticklabels collide with the
> major ones is to put them on separate lines as illustrated in
> the original post. Supporting multi-line text (embedded '\n's
> in ticklabels) would permit this. All you would have to do is
> begin the minor ticklabels with one or more '\n's. How is
> this coming along?
I've laid the groundwork for it, by factoring the text instances out
of the backends. Now the backends just are asked to draw plain old
strings at a given location, size, rotation etc. Before they were
asked to draw matplotlib text instances, which means if the string
contained new lines and the backend couldn't handle them, you were
hosed. Under the new framework, the Text class will newline split the
strings, and layout the separate strings. This will buy you newline
separated strings on all backends with rotation for those that support
arbitrary rotation (gd, agg, ps)
So the short answer is: it's close. Depending on how the other things
that I'm working on go, maybe next week, maybe a little later.
JDH