autofmt_xdate deletes x-axis labels of all subplots

Question

I use autofmt_xdate to plot long x-axis labels in a readable way. The problem is, when I want to combine different subplots, the x-axis labeling of the other subplots disappears, which I do not appreciate for the leftmost subplot in the figure below (two rows high). Is there a way to prevent autofmt_xdate from quenching the other x-axis labels? Or is there another way to rotate the labels? As you can see I experimented with xticks and "rotate" as well, but the results were not satisfying because the labels were rotated around their center, which resulted in messy labeling.

Script that produces plot below:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from numpy import arange
import numpy
from matplotlib import rc

rc("figure",figsize=(15,10))
#rc('figure.subplot',bottom=0.1,hspace=0.1)
rc("legend",fontsize=16)
fig = plt.figure()


Test_Data = numpy.random.normal(size=20)

fig = plt.figure()
Dimension = (2,3)
plt.subplot2grid(Dimension, (0,0),rowspan=2)
plt.plot(Test_Data)
plt.subplot2grid(Dimension, (0,1),colspan=2)
for i,j in zip(Test_Data,arange(len(Test_Data))):
    plt.bar(i,j)
plt.legend(arange(len(Test_Data)))
plt.subplot2grid(Dimension, (1,1),colspan=2)
xticks = [r"%s (%i)" % (a,b) for a,b in zip(Test_Data,Test_Data)]
plt.xticks(arange(len(Test_Data)),xticks)
fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.ylabel(r'$Some Latex Formula/Divided by some Latex Formula$',fontsize=14)
plt.plot(Test_Data)
#plt.setp(plt.xticks()[1],rotation=30)
plt.tight_layout()
#plt.show()

Answer 1

This is actually a feature of the autofmt_xdate method. From the documentation of the autofmt_xdate method:

Date ticklabels often overlap, so it is useful to rotate them and right align them. Also, a common use case is a number of subplots with shared xaxes where the x-axis is date data. The ticklabels are often long, and it helps to rotate them on the bottom subplot and turn them off on other subplots, as well as turn off xlabels.

If you want to rotate the xticklabels of the bottom right subplot only, use

plt.setp(plt.xticks()[1], rotation=30, ha='right') # ha is the same as horizontalalignment

This rotates the ticklabels 30 degrees and right aligns them (same result as when using autofmt_xdate) for the bottom right subplot, leaving the two other subplots unchanged.