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Adjust axes to make space for offset line plot

I would like to plot a series of curves in the same Axes each having a constant y offset from eachother. Because the data I have needs to be displayed in log scale, simply adding a y offset to each curve (as done here) does not give the desired output.
I have tried using matplotlib.transforms to achieve the same, i.e. artificially shifting the curve in Figure coordinates. This achieves the desired result, but requires adjusting the Axes y limits so that the shifted curves are visible. Here is an example to illustrate this, though such data would not require log scale to be visible:
import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,1)
for i in range(1,19):
x, y = np.arange(200), np.random.rand(200)
dy = 0.5*i
shifted = mpl.transforms.offset_copy(ax.transData, y=dy, fig=fig, units='inches')
ax.set_xlim(0, 200)
ax.set_ylim(0.1, 1e20)
ax.set_yscale('log')
ax.plot(x, y, transform=shifted, c=mpl.cm.plasma(i/18), lw=2)
The problem is that to make all the shifted curves visible, I would need to adjust the ylim to a very high number, which compresses all the curves so that the features visible because of the log scale cannot be seen anymore.
Since the displayed y axis values are meaningless to me, is there any way to artificially extend the Axes limits to display all the curves, without having to make the Figure very large? Apparently this can be done with seaborn, but if possible I would like to stick to matplotlib.
EDIT:
This is the kind of data I need to plot (an X-ray diffraction pattern varying with temperature):

Place xticks and yticks in the pixel center on imshow plot

I am working with matplotlib to plot a heat map with some information and I want to move the xticks and the yticks to the center. I have searched in stackoverflow for previous questions but I couldn't reach one suitable for the problem. I attach my code and the image that I get:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import colors
import numpy as np
def plot():
intensity= np.random.rand(10,10)
matrix_intensity=np.matrix(intensity)
max_intensity=matrix_intensity.max()
min_intensity = matrix_intensity.min()
for e in range(len(intensity)):
for i in range(len(intensity[e])):
intensity[e][i]=float(intensity[e][i])/float(max_intensity)
np.random.seed(101)
cmap = colors.ListedColormap(['white','khaki', 'goldenrod','yellowgreen','mediumseagreen','darkcyan','tomato','indianred' ,'sienna','maroon'])
bounds = np.linspace(min_intensity/max_intensity,1,11).tolist()
norm = colors.BoundaryNorm(bounds, cmap.N)
img = plt.imshow(intensity, interpolation='none', origin='lower',extent=[0,len(intensity),0,len(intensity)],
cmap=cmap, norm=norm)
cb=plt.colorbar(img, fraction=0.1,cmap=cmap, norm=norm, boundaries=bounds,format='%.2f') #'%.2f')
cb.set_label(label='Ratio',fontsize=12,labelpad=10)
plt.ylabel('Origin',fontsize=11)
plt.xlabel('Destination',fontsize=11)
plt.title('Best route:',fontsize=10)
plt.suptitle('Best Solution:',fontsize=10)
plt.xticks(range(1,len(intensity)+1))
plt.yticks(range(1,len(intensity)+1))
plt.savefig('images/hello.png')
plt.show()
The fact is that I would like the x and the y ticks to point out the center of every square because otherwise, it doesn't make sense to plot the squares. Does somebody know how to fix this? Maybe this question is obvious but the matplotlib documentation for all the statements sometimes is difficult to understand.

The obvious solution would probably to use a different extent, namely to let the image live in the range between 0.5 and len(intensity)+0.5.
extent=[.5, len(intensity)+.5, .5, len(intensity)+.5]
img = plt.imshow(intensity, interpolation='none', origin='lower',extent=extent,
cmap=cmap, norm=norm)

You need to change the way you set your xticks and yticks loc and labels to below:
plt.xticks([x-0.5 for x in list(range(1,len(intensity)+1))], range(1,len(intensity)+1))
plt.yticks([x-0.5 for x in list(range(1,len(intensity)+1))], range(1,len(intensity)+1))
Output:

The other answers are both good, however I would like to provide a more general implementation that also doesn't alter default ticks, as I have a function that can be used to calculate the axis limits and set them as in #ImportanceOfBeingErnest answer.
import numpy as np
def span_from_pixels(p,n=None):
"""From positions of pixel centers p returns a range from side to side. Useful to adjust plot extent in imshow.
In alternative, p can be provided as range and number of pixels.
Note that np.linspace has flag retsteps to return step size."""
if n is None:
n=len(p)
dx=(np.max(p)-np.min(p))/(n-1)
return (np.min(p)-dx/2,np.max(p)+dx/2)
def test_span_from_pixels():
print (span_from_pixels([0,3],4)) #[-0.5,3.5]
print (span_from_pixels([0,2],3)) #[-0.5,2.5]
print (span_from_pixels([0,1,2])) #[-0.5,2.5]
print (span_from_pixels([0,0.5,1,1.5,2])) #[-0.25,2.25]
Please let me know if something doesn't work, these are tested in my code, but I made some change to remove dependencies. I assume I didn't break anything, but I cannot test it now.

Show a (discrete) colorbar next to a plot as a legend for the (automatically chosen) line colors

I tried to make a plot showing many lines, but it is hard to tell them apart. They have different colors, but I would like to make it easy to show which line is which. A normal legend does not really work so well, since I have more than 10 lines.
The lines follow a logical sequence. I would like to (1) have their color automatically chosen from a colormaps (preferably one that has a smooth ordering, such as viridis or a rainbow). Then I would like (2) to have the tick marks next to the color bar to correspond to the index i for each line (or better a text label from an array of strings textlabels[i]).
Here's a minimal piece of code (with some gaps where I am not sure what to use). I hope this illustrates what I am trying.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Genereate some values to plot on the x-axis
x = np.linspace(0,1,1000)
# Some code to select a (discrete version of) a rainbow/viridis color map
...
# Loop over lines that should appear in the plot
for i in range(0,9):
# Plot something (using straight lines with different slope as example)
plt.plot(i*x)
# Some code to plot a discrete color bar next
# to the plot with ticks showing the value of i
...
I currently have this. I would like the color bar to have the ticks with values of i, i.e. 0, 1, 2, ... next to it as tick marks.
Example figure of what I have now. It is hard to tell the lines apart now.

One gets a colormap via plt.get_cmap("name of cmap", number_of_colors).
This colormap can be used to compute the colors for the plots. It can also be used to generate a colorbar.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.colors
n = 10 # how many lines to draw or number of discrete color levels
x = np.linspace(0,1,17)
cmap = plt.get_cmap("viridis", n)
for i in range(0,n):
plt.plot(i*x, color=cmap(i))
norm= matplotlib.colors.BoundaryNorm(np.arange(0,n+1)-0.5, n)
sm = plt.cm.ScalarMappable(cmap=cmap, norm=norm)
sm.set_array([])
plt.colorbar(sm, ticks=np.arange(0,n))
plt.show()

Setting both axes logarithmic in bar plot matploblib

I have already binned data to plot a histogram. For this reason I'm using the plt.bar() function. I'd like to set both axes in the plot to a logarithmic scale.
If I set plt.bar(x, y, width=10, color='b', log=True) which lets me set the y-axis to log but I can't set the x-axis logarithmic.
I've tried plt.xscale('log') unfortunately this doesn't work right. The x-axis ticks vanish and the sizes of the bars don't have equal width.
I would be grateful for any help.

By default, the bars of a barplot have a width of 0.8. Therefore they appear larger for smaller x values on a logarithmic scale. If instead of specifying a constant width, one uses the distance between the bin edges and supplies this to the width argument, the bars will have the correct width. One would also need to set the align to "edge" for this to work.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(1)
x = np.logspace(0, 5, num=21)
y = (np.sin(1.e-2*(x[:-1]-20))+3)**10
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.bar(x[:-1], y, width=np.diff(x), log=True,ec="k", align="edge")
ax.set_xscale("log")
plt.show()
I cannot reproduce missing ticklabels for a logarithmic scaling. This may be due to some settings in the code that are not shown in the question or due to the fact that an older matplotlib version is used. The example here works fine with matplotlib 2.0.

If the goal is to have equal width bars, assuming datapoints are not equidistant, then the most proper solution is to set width as
plt.bar(x, y, width=c*np.array(x), color='b', log=True) for a constant c appropriate for the plot. Alignment can be anything.

I know it is a very old question and you might have solved it but I've come to this post because I was with something like this but at the y axis and I manage to solve it just using ax.set_ylim(df['my data'].min()+100, df['my data'].max()+100). In y axis I have some sensible information which I thouhg the best way was to show in log scale but when I set log scale I couldn't see the numbers proper (as this post in x axis) so I just leave the idea of use log and use the min and max argment. It sets the scale of my graph much like as log. Still looking for another way for doesnt need use that -+100 at set_ylim.

While this does not actually use pyplot.bar, I think this method could be helpful in achieving what the OP is trying to do. I found this to be easier than trying to calibrate the width as a function of the log-scale, though it's more steps. Create a line collection whose width is independent of the chart scale.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.collections as coll
#Generate data and sort into bins
a = np.random.logseries(0.5, 1000)
hist, bin_edges = np.histogram(a, bins=20, density=False)
x = bin_edges[:-1] # remove the top-end from bin_edges to match dimensions of hist
lines = []
for i in range(len(x)):
pair=[(x[i],0), (x[i], hist[i])]
lines.append(pair)
linecoll = coll.LineCollection(lines, linewidths=10, linestyles='solid')
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.add_collection(linecoll)
ax.set_xscale("log")
ax.set_yscale("log")
ax.set_xlim(min(x)/10,max(x)*10)
ax.set_ylim(0.1,1.1*max(hist)) #since this is an unweighted histogram, the logy doesn't make much sense.
Resulting plot - no frills
One drawback is that the "bars" will be centered, but this could be changed by offsetting the x-values by half of the linewidth value ... I think it would be
x_new = x + (linewidth/2)*10**round(np.log10(x),0).

Subplots: tight_layout changes figure size

Changing the vertical distance between two subplot using tight_layout(h_pad=-1) changes the total figuresize. How can I define the figuresize using tight_layout?
Here is the code:
#define figure
pl.figure(figsize=(10, 6.25))
ax1=subplot(211)
img=pl.imshow(np.random.random((10,50)), interpolation='none')
ax1.set_xticklabels(()) #hides the tickslabels of the first plot
subplot(212)
x=linspace(0,50)
pl.plot(x,x,'k-')
xlim( ax1.get_xlim() ) #same x-axis for both plots
And here is the results:
If I write
pl.tight_layout(h_pad=-2)
in the last line, then I get this:
As you can see, the figure is bigger...

You can use a GridSpec object to control precisely width and height ratios, as answered on this thread and documented here.
Experimenting with your code, I could produce something like what you want, by using a height_ratio that assigns twice the space to the upper subplot, and increasing the h_pad parameter to the tight_layout call. This does not sound completely right, but maybe you can adjust this further ...
import numpy as np
from matplotlib.pyplot import *
import matplotlib.pyplot as pl
import matplotlib.gridspec as gridspec
#define figure
fig = pl.figure(figsize=(10, 6.25))
gs = gridspec.GridSpec(2, 1, height_ratios=[2,1])
ax1=subplot(gs[0])
img=pl.imshow(np.random.random((10,50)), interpolation='none')
ax1.set_xticklabels(()) #hides the tickslabels of the first plot
ax2=subplot(gs[1])
x=np.linspace(0,50)
ax2.plot(x,x,'k-')
xlim( ax1.get_xlim() ) #same x-axis for both plots
fig.tight_layout(h_pad=-5)
show()
There were other issues, like correcting the imports, adding numpy, and plotting to ax2 instead of directly with pl. The output I see is this:

This case is peculiar because of the fact that the default aspect ratios of images and plots are not the same. So it is worth noting for people looking to remove the spaces in a grid of subplots consisting of images only or of plots only that you may find an appropriate solution among the answers to this question (and those linked to it): How to remove the space between subplots in matplotlib.pyplot?.
The aspect ratios of the subplots in this particular example are as follows:
# Default aspect ratio of images:
ax1.get_aspect()
# 1.0
# Which is as it is expected based on the default settings in rcParams file:
matplotlib.rcParams['image.aspect']
# 'equal'
# Default aspect ratio of plots:
ax2.get_aspect()
# 'auto'
The size of ax1 and the space beneath it are adjusted automatically based on the number of pixels along the x-axis (i.e. width) so as to preserve the 'equal' aspect ratio while fitting both subplots within the figure. As you mentioned, using fig.tight_layout(h_pad=xxx) or the similar fig.set_constrained_layout_pads(hspace=xxx) is not a good option as this makes the figure larger.
To remove the gap while preserving the original figure size, you can use fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=xxx) or the equivalent plt.subplots(gridspec_kw=dict(hspace=xxx)), as shown in the following example:
import numpy as np # v 1.19.2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # v 3.3.2
np.random.seed(1)
fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(10, 6.25),
gridspec_kw=dict(hspace=-0.206))
# For those not using plt.subplots, you can use this instead:
# fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=-0.206)
size = 50
ax1.imshow(np.random.random((10, size)))
ax1.xaxis.set_visible(False)
# Create plot of a line that is aligned with the image above
x = np.arange(0, size)
ax2.plot(x, x, 'k-')
ax2.set_xlim(ax1.get_xlim())
plt.show()
I am not aware of any way to define the appropriate hspace automatically so that the gap can be removed for any image width. As stated in the docstring for fig.subplots_adjust(), it corresponds to the height of the padding between subplots, as a fraction of the average axes height. So I attempted to compute hspace by dividing the gap between the subplots by the average height of both subplots like this:
# Extract axes positions in figure coordinates
ax1_x0, ax1_y0, ax1_x1, ax1_y1 = np.ravel(ax1.get_position())
ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1 = np.ravel(ax2.get_position())
# Compute negative hspace to close the vertical gap between subplots
ax1_h = ax1_y1-ax1_y0
ax2_h = ax2_y1-ax2_y0
avg_h = (ax1_h+ax2_h)/2
gap = ax1_y0-ax2_y1
hspace=-(gap/avg_h) # this divided by 2 also does not work
fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=hspace)
Unfortunately, this does not work. Maybe someone else has a solution for this.
It is also worth mentioning that I tried removing the gap between subplots by editing the y positions like in this example:
# Extract axes positions in figure coordinates
ax1_x0, ax1_y0, ax1_x1, ax1_y1 = np.ravel(ax1.get_position())
ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1 = np.ravel(ax2.get_position())
# Set new y positions: shift ax1 down over gap
gap = ax1_y0-ax2_y1
ax1.set_position([ax1_x0, ax1_y0-gap, ax1_x1, ax1_y1-gap])
ax2.set_position([ax2_x0, ax2_y0, ax2_x1, ax2_y1])
Unfortunately, this (and variations of this) produces seemingly unpredictable results, including a figure resizing similar to when using fig.tight_layout(). Maybe someone else has an explanation for what is happening here behind the scenes.