Make identical matplotlib plots with y-axes of different sizes

Question

I am trying to make a series of matplotlib plots that plot timespans for different classes of objects. Each plot has an identical x-axis and plot elements like a title and a

Answer 1

You can start by defining the margins on top and bottom in units of inches. Having a fixed unit of one data unit in inches allows to calculate how large the final figure should be. Then dividing the margin in inches by the figure height gives the relative margin in units of figure size, this can be supplied to the figure using subplots_adjust, given the subplots has been added with add_subplot.

A minimal example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

data = [np.random.rand(i,2) for i in [2,5,8,4,3]]

height_unit = 0.25 #inch
t = 0.15; b = 0.4  #inch

for d in data:
    height = height_unit*(len(d)+1)+t+b
    fig = plt.figure(figsize=(5, height))
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
    ax.set_ylim(-1, len(d))
    fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=b/height, top=1-t/height, left=0.2, right=0.9)

    ax.barh(range(len(d)),d[:,1], left=d[:,0], ec="k")
    ax.set_yticks(range(len(d)))

plt.show()