The first method did *not* for some reason!?!?
> I would prefer to make the second method work because
> it lets me avoid having to define a Figure object
> /explicitly/ as above. The problem with adding a
> subplot to a Figure object is that that many defaults
> change that I would have to fix. (e.g. grid lines
> disappear, plot dimensions are altered in strange way,
> etc.)
> How fix second way to avoid a Figure object?
This is a matplotlib bug -- in axes.py in the Axes.text function,
replace the line
if t.get_clip_on(): t.set_clip_box(self.bbox)
with
if kwargs.has_key('clip_on'): t.set_clip_box(self.bbox)
Thanks for the report!
JDH