Reduce Whitespace in pcolor matplotlib plot

Question

I'm currently working on plotting pivoted tables using matplotlib pcolor but my axes are not functioning like i would like them to. I plot the tables using:

pyl.pcolor(pivot_99)
pyl.colorbar()
pyp.suptitle('Pivot 99', fontsize=14)
pyp.xlabel('Site Number', fontsize=12)
pyp.ylabel('Site Number', fontsize=12)
pyp.yticks(arange(len(pivot_99.index)),pivot_99.index)
pyp.xticks(arange(len(pivot_99.columns)),pivot_99.columns, rotation = 90)
pyl.savefig('Pivot 99.png')
pyl.show()

Where pivot_99 is a dataframe consisting of numbers between 0 and 1. The length of the index and columns are always the same but are different values for different years. When I plot pivot_99 it looks fine:

However when I plot the 2000 Heatmap there is extra space on the top and right.

Does anyone know why this is happening or how I can fix the graph so only space with color is showing? Thanks

Answer 1

Try with set_xlim and set_ylim like in this example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as pyp

pyp.gca().set_xlim((1,10))
pyp.gca().set_ylim((1,12))
pyp.plot([1,2],[1,2])
pyp.show()

You can try with xlim=ylim=558, I can test it because I don't have your data :(

Answer 2

Alternatively, you can use prettyplotlib which will set your xlim, ylim for you automatically, remove your spines and ticks, and give you a reasonable colorbar.

import prettyplotlib as ppl
ppl.pcolormesh(pivot_99)

Full disclosure: I am the prettyplotlib author :)