Aspect ratio in subplots with various y-axes

Question

I would like the following code to produce 4 subplots of the same size with a common aspect ratio between the size of x-axis and y-axis set by me. Referring to the below exa

Answer 1

The theory

Different coordinate systems exists in matplotlib. The differences between different coordinate systems can really confuse a lot of people. What the OP want is aspect ratio in display coordinate but ax.set_aspect() is setting the aspect ratio in data coordinate. Their relationship can be formulated as:

aspect = 1.0/dataRatio*dispRatio

where, aspect is the argument to use in set_aspect method, dataRatio is aspect ratio in data coordinate and dispRatio is your desired aspect ratio in display coordinate.

The practice

There is a get_data_ratio method which we can use to make our code more concise. A work code snippet is shown below:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2)

dispRatio = 0.5
for i, ax in enumerate(axes.flat, start=1):
    ax.plot(np.arange(0, i * 4, i))
    ax.set(aspect=1.0/ax.get_data_ratio()*dispRatio, adjustable='box-forced')

plt.show()

I have also written a detailed post about all this stuff here.