You should use the OO interface to matplotlib, rather than the state machine interface. Almost all of the plt.*
function are thin wrappers that basically do gca().*
.
plt.subplot
returns an axes
object. Once you have a reference to the axes object you can plot directly to it, change its limits, etc.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
ax1 = plt.subplot(131)
ax1.scatter([1, 2], [3, 4])
ax1.set_xlim([0, 5])
ax1.set_ylim([0, 5])
ax2 = plt.subplot(132)
ax2.scatter([1, 2],[3, 4])
ax2.set_xlim([0, 5])
ax2.set_ylim([0, 5])
and so on for as many axes as you want.
or better, wrap it all up in a loop:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
DATA_x = ([1, 2],
[2, 3],
[3, 4])
DATA_y = DATA_x[::-1]
XLIMS = [[0, 10]] * 3
YLIMS = [[0, 10]] * 3
for j, (x, y, xlim, ylim) in enumerate(zip(DATA_x, DATA_y, XLIMS, YLIMS)):
ax = plt.subplot(1, 3, j + 1)
ax.scatter(x, y)
ax.set_xlim(xlim)
ax.set_ylim(ylim)