Removing Relative Shift in Matplotlib Axis

Plotting against large numbers in Matplotlib can result in an axis with a relative shift for the tick labels. To illustrate, consider the following plot:

plot([1000, 1001, 1002], [1, 2, 3])

This generates ticks on the abscissa axis as follows:

0.0     0.5     1.0     1.5     2.0
 1e3

To eliminate the " 1e3" label and obtain tick labels of the form "1000.0", "1001.0", etc., follow these steps:

1. Grab the current axes using gca().
2. Obtain the x-axis axis object using get_xaxis().
3. Retrieve the major formatter object using get_major_formatter().
4. Set the useOffset attribute of the formatter to False using set_useOffset(False).
5. Call draw() to update the plot.

Alternatively, in newer versions of Matplotlib (1.4 ), the default behavior can be modified via the axes.formatter.useoffset rcparam:

matplotlib.rcParams['axes.formatter.useoffset'] = False

By applying these methods, you can remove the relative shift in the axis and obtain tick labels in the desired format.