Hide overlapping tick marks in axes corner

Community matplotlib-users
1

Hello,

I am looking for a way to hide tick marks (not the labels!) that coincide with axis lines. I think this is a problem for me because of the relative line thicknesses of my axis lines and tick marks, but I want to leave those thicknesses unchanged (I like the look of the thickness settings I am using now).

Here is a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

overlapping_ticks.PNG
overlapping_ticks.PNG330×216 4.56 KB

I know this looks minor, but it is quite obvious on some plots and I’d really like to get rid of it.

Thanks,

Julian Irwin

2

Try this:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.plot([0, 1], [0, 1])
print(ax.get_xticks())
ax.set_xticks(ax.get_xticks()[1:-1]) # Remove first and last ticks
print(ax.get_xticks())

···

On 28 January 2016 at 19:49, Julian Irwin <[email protected]...> wrote:

I am looking for a way to hide tick marks (not the labels!) that coincide with axis lines. I think this is a problem for me because of the relative line thicknesses of my axis lines and tick marks, but I want to leave those thicknesses unchanged (I like the look of the thickness settings I am using now).

--
Oscar

3

Thanks for your suggestion Oscar. I tried editing the ticks like this, but this method removes both the tick marks and the labels.

I think I have found a decent solution. Unfortunately my solution required a very particular order of operations. It is much less convenient than the functions provided in the API like tick_params(), which don’t care if you have run plt.draw() ahead of time…

  1. Run all of the setup for the plot and also the plotting commands (ax.plot(), ax.hist()…whatever)

  2. Run plt.draw() because this updates the tick objects contained in your axes.

  3. Grab your Tick objects: ticks = ax.[x/y]axis.[major/minor]Ticks

  4. For each tick you want to hide do:

tick.tick1On = False

tick.tick2On = False

The 1 and 2 refer to the bottom, top (left, right) for the x (y) axis respectively.

  1. Run plt.show(), fig.show() or fig.savefig or whatever else you are using.

Ahhhhh, no messy ticks in the corner!

Julian

···

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@…287…> wrote:

On 28 January 2016 at 19:49, Julian Irwin <julian.irwin@…985…> wrote:

I am looking for a way to hide tick marks (not the labels!) that coincide with axis lines. I think this is a problem for me because of the relative line thicknesses of my axis lines and tick marks, but I want to leave those thicknesses unchanged (I like the look of the thickness settings I am using now).

Try this:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()

ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)

ax.plot([0, 1], [0, 1])

print(ax.get_xticks())

ax.set_xticks(ax.get_xticks()[1:-1]) # Remove first and last ticks

print(ax.get_xticks())

–

Oscar