Matplotlib/pyplot: How to enforce axis range?

Solution 1:

Calling p.plot after setting the limits is why it is rescaling. You are correct in that turning autoscaling off will get the right answer, but so will calling xlim() or ylim() after your plot command.

I use this quite a lot to invert the x axis, I work in astronomy and we use a magnitude system which is backwards (ie. brighter stars have a smaller magnitude) so I usually swap the limits with

lims = xlim()
xlim([lims[1], lims[0]]) 

Solution 2:

To answer my own question, the trick is to turn auto scaling off...

p.axis([0.0,600.0, 10000.0,20000.0])
ax = p.gca()
ax.set_autoscale_on(False)