Sorry if this is a silly question; i couldn't find the
> answer in the source files or the mailing list archive.
> I am using matplotlib 0-60.2. Is there an equivalent in
> matplotlib to the matlab command 'axis square', to set
> the aspect ratio to 1? More generally, can i set the
> aspect ratio to any ratio i like? I am interested in
> this for plot() and scatter().
There is no axis square at the moment (easy to add though). But yes,
you can set the axes to any aspect ratio you want. Rather than
calling 'subplot', call 'axes'.
# left, bottom, width, height
axes([0.15, 0.15, 0.7, 0.7])
The numbers are fractions of the figure size. So left is 0.15*figure
width, bottom is 0.15 * figure height, width is 0.7 * figure width and
height is 0.7 * figure height. See
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.matlab.html#-axes for
more info.
You can control the figure dimensions using the figsize argument (args
in inches, my apologies)
# figure is 6 inches square
figure(1, figsize=(6, 6))
See http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.matlab.html#-figure.
Here is and example script
from matplotlib.matlab import *
side = 7 # side of square in inches
figure(1, figsize=(side, side))
# left, bottom, width, height
axes([0.15, 0.15, 0.7, 0.7])
N = 500 # number of scatter points
scatter(rand(N), rand(N)) # should be square
savefig('test.ps')
show()
That said, there is a very important caveat. This probably won't
appear square on your monitor because the dots per inch on your
monitor likely differ in the horizontal and vertical directions (it
should be square if you save as *.ps and print it on a postscript
printer). When I implemented freetype fonts for matplotlib, I asked
on this list if anyone was interested in matplotlib supporting dpi in
the x and y direction so that you could actually create figures in
true sizes on the monitor, but there was no interest at the time. The
freetype lib supports horizontal and vertical dpi, which is why it
came up at the time.
JDH