make only left subplots and bottom subplots (in MxN panels) contain x and y axis labels

Question

Is there any way in a panel of NxM subplots to just have the axes being shown for the left column and bottom row.

A|N|N|N
A|N|N|N
A|N|N|N
A|A|A|A

Where A = axis and N = no axis

Sometimes my subplots are 10x8, 3x4, 4x9 etc. and they all have the same x and y axis. I just want it to appear on the very left and the very bottom of that subset. At the moment I have to know which axis it is plotting to and do

    if (figi-1) % 7 != 0:
        ax.set_yticklabels([])

    if figi < 29:
        ax1.set_xticklabels([])

I want to generalise this for any NxM panel arrangement without having to know before hand. Thanks.

EDIT: I have found a way to do the y-axis. I setup the number of panels wide using:

nwide = 12
nhigh = 5

Which means I can just do

if (figi-1) % nwide != 0:
    ax.set_yticklabels([])

Any ideas for bottom?

EDIT: Worked it out. x-axis is as follows:

if figi < (nwide*nhigh) - nwide:
    ax.set_xticklabels([])

Answer 1

The best solution is probably pyplot.subplots(). You can do like:

fig, axes = pyplot.subplots(nrows=3, ncols=4, sharex=True, sharey=True)

and then only the left and bottom axes will have the labels displayed.

To access each subplot you can get it from axes like you do in a matrix: ax = axes[i,j]

To control the tick positions you can use:

ax.xaxis.set_tick_position('bottom')
ax.yaxis.set_tick_position('left')

To set an axis label you can do:

ax.set_label_text('Something')