Matplotlib different size subplots

Question

I need to add two subplots to a figure. One subplot needs to be about three times as wide as the second (same height). I accomplished this using GridSpec and the colspan argument but I would like to do this using figure so I can save to PDF. I can adjust the first figure using the figsize argument in the constructor, but how do I change the size of the second plot?

Answer 1

• Another way is to use the subplots function and pass the width ratio with gridspec_kw
  • matplotlib Tutorial: Customizing Figure Layouts Using GridSpec and Other Functions
  • matplotlib.gridspec.GridSpec has available gridspect_kw options

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt   # generate some data x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.2) y = np.sin(x)  # plot it f, (a0, a1) = plt.subplots(1, 2, gridspec_kw={'width_ratios': [3, 1]}) a0.plot(x, y) a1.plot(y, x)  f.tight_layout() f.savefig('grid_figure.pdf') 

• Because the question is canonical, here is an example with vertical subplots.

# plot it f, (a0, a1, a2) = plt.subplots(3, 1, gridspec_kw={'height_ratios': [1, 1, 3]})  a0.plot(x, y) a1.plot(x, y) a2.plot(x, y)  f.tight_layout() 

Answer 2

You can use gridspec and figure:

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  from matplotlib import gridspec  # generate some data x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.2) y = np.sin(x)  # plot it fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))  gs = gridspec.GridSpec(1, 2, width_ratios=[3, 1])  ax0 = plt.subplot(gs[0]) ax0.plot(x, y) ax1 = plt.subplot(gs[1]) ax1.plot(y, x)  plt.tight_layout() plt.savefig('grid_figure.pdf')