Repository navigation
YearLocator should prefer ticks at the turn of the decade #9838
Description
Bug summary
YearLocator is agnostic about decades. Ticks at the decades are nicer, so when choosing a starting value in some cases it should prefer to start a the turn of the decade or even mid decade. i.e 1970 instead of 1968, 1965 instead of 1964. This "smart" behaviour should apply when the intervals are factors of 5 and 10.
Code for reproduction
import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = [datetime.datetime(1966, 1, 1),
datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 1)]
ticks = [datetime.datetime(i, 1, 1)
for i in range(1970, 2020, 10)]
y = np.arange(len(x))
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot_date(x, y)
# ax.set_xticks(ticks) # preferred ticksActual outcome
Better outcome
Activity
dstansby commentedon Nov 23, 2017
Probably related to #9801
has2k1 commentedon Nov 23, 2017
Yes I think the motivation behind both issues is the same, but the solution (so far) does not work for this case.
jklymak commentedon Nov 23, 2017
Yeah, the logic for years is different because you don't know the range of years to start with. But, this should be easy to fix with a bit of extra logic (I think).