adjusting heights of individual subplots in matplotlib in Python

Question

if I have a series of subplots with one column and many rows, i.e.:

plt.subplot(4, 1, 1) # first subplot
plt.subplot(4, 1, 2) # second subplot
# ...

how can I adjust the height of the first N subplots? For example, if I have 4 subplots, each on its own row, I want all of them to have the same width but the first 3 subplots to be shorter, i.e. have their y-axes be smaller and take up less of the plot than the y-axis of the last plot in the row. How can I do this?

thanks.

Answer 1

Use the AxesGrid toolkit.

Answer 2

There are multiple ways to do this. The most basic (and least flexible) way is to just call something like:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.subplot(6,1,1)
plt.subplot(6,1,2)
plt.subplot(6,1,3)
plt.subplot(2,1,2)

Which will give you something like this:

However, this isn't very flexible. If you're using matplotlib >= 1.0.0, look into using GridSpec. It's quite nice, and is a much more flexible way of laying out subplots.