How to create major and minor gridlines with different linestyles in Python
I am currently using matplotlib.pyplot
to create graphs and would like to have the major gridlines solid and black and the minor ones either greyed or dashed.
In the grid properties, which=both/major/mine
, and then color and linestyle are defined simply by linestyle. Is there a way to specify minor linestyle only?
The appropriate code I have so far is
plt.plot(current, counts, 'rd', markersize=8)
plt.yscale('log')
plt.grid(b=True, which='both', color='0.65', linestyle='-')
Actually, it is as simple as setting major
and minor
separately:
In [9]: plot([23, 456, 676, 89, 906, 34, 2345])
Out[9]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x6112f90>]
In [10]: yscale('log')
In [11]: grid(b=True, which='major', color='b', linestyle='-')
In [12]: grid(b=True, which='minor', color='r', linestyle='--')
The gotcha with minor grids is that you have to have minor tick marks turned on too. In the above code this is done by yscale('log')
, but it can also be done with plt.minorticks_on()
.
A simple DIY way would be to make the grid yourself:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1,2,3], [2,3,4], 'ro')
for xmaj in ax.xaxis.get_majorticklocs():
ax.axvline(x=xmaj, ls='-')
for xmin in ax.xaxis.get_minorticklocs():
ax.axvline(x=xmin, ls='--')
for ymaj in ax.yaxis.get_majorticklocs():
ax.axhline(y=ymaj, ls='-')
for ymin in ax.yaxis.get_minorticklocs():
ax.axhline(y=ymin, ls='--')
plt.show()