I am drawing two subplots with Matplotlib, essentially following :
subplot(211); imshow(a); scatter(..., ...)
subplot(212); imshow(b); scatter(..., ...)
Can I draw lines between those two subplots? How would I do that?
3 Answers
The solution from the other answers are suboptimal in many cases (as they would only work if no changes are made to the plot after calculating the points).
A better solution would use the specially designed ConnectionPatch:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.patches import ConnectionPatch
import numpy as np
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,5))
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(121)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(122)
x,y = np.random.rand(100),np.random.rand(100)
ax1.plot(x,y,'ko')
ax2.plot(x,y,'ko')
i = 10
xy = (x[i],y[i])
con = ConnectionPatch(xyA=xy, xyB=xy, coordsA="data", coordsB="data",
axesA=ax2, axesB=ax1, color="red")
ax2.add_artist(con)
ax1.plot(x[i],y[i],'ro',markersize=10)
ax2.plot(x[i],y[i],'ro',markersize=10)
plt.show()
answered May 17, 2017 at 11:11
ImportanceOfBeingErnest
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3 Comments
F.X.
Good point. This actually works strictly better than the previously accepted answer, so I'll accept it instead. Thanks!
Joel
It's worth a comment on why the
ax2.add_artist is on ax2 rather than ax1 github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/8744 and why axesA is set to be ax2
Stefan
Apparently, when using several
subplots, I need to use the fig.add_artist, otherwise it seems to mess with constrained_layout.You could use fig.line. It adds any line to your figure. Figure lines are higher level than axis lines, so you don't need any axis to draw it.
This example marks the same point on the two axes. It's necessary to be careful with the coordinate system, but the transform does all the hard work for you.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib
import numpy as np
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,5))
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(121)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(122)
x,y = np.random.rand(100),np.random.rand(100)
ax1.plot(x,y,'ko')
ax2.plot(x,y,'ko')
i = 10
transFigure = fig.transFigure.inverted()
coord1 = transFigure.transform(ax1.transData.transform([x[i],y[i]]))
coord2 = transFigure.transform(ax2.transData.transform([x[i],y[i]]))
line = matplotlib.lines.Line2D((coord1[0],coord2[0]),(coord1[1],coord2[1]),
transform=fig.transFigure)
fig.lines = line,
ax1.plot(x[i],y[i],'ro',markersize=20)
ax2.plot(x[i],y[i],'ro',markersize=20)
plt.show()
4 Comments
tacaswell
probably better to do
fig.lines.append(line) to not blow away anything already there.
scholi
Very nice solution. However I got line plotted at wrong coordinates with jupyter. The solution was to add
fig.canvas.draw() before calling transFigure = fig.transFigure.inverted() in order to work with the correct coordinates.
Roshan Sam
Very elegant solution. Including the above comments, one final step I did to get it right was to put the line drawing code at the very end, just before
plt.show(). Putting it before commands like ax.set_xlim() gave me wrong lines.I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but a simple trick to plot across subplots.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
ax1=plt.figure(1).add_subplot(211)
ax2=plt.figure(1).add_subplot(212)
x_data=np.linspace(0,10,20)
ax1.plot(x_data, x_data**2,'o')
ax2.plot(x_data, x_data**3, 'o')
ax3 = plt.figure(1).add_subplot(111)
ax3.plot([5,5],[0,1],'--')
ax3.set_xlim([0,10])
ax3.axis("off")
plt.show()
annotate.