[Feature request] span axis labels

[cvanelteren]

Description

I often have the issue where the axes are not shared, but I do want to share the labels. For example when I am mixing some axes and not others. I propose to add a feature where you can specify the sharing of the axis. As far as I am aware this is not available in proplot. Currently I resort to something like

def add_main(fig, nrows, ncols, span):
 main = fig.add_subplot(nrows, ncols, span)
 main.set_facecolor("none")
 main.set_xticks([])
 main.set_yticks([])
 for spine in main.axes.spines.values():
     spine.set_visible(False)
 return main

fig, ax = plt.subplots(ncols = 2, nrows = 2, share = 0)
main_top = add_main(fig, 2, 2, (1, 2))
main_top.set_xlabel("group 1", labelpad = 25)
main_top.set_ylabel("group 1", labelpad = 25)


main_bottom = add_main(fig, 2, 2, (3, 4))
main_bottom.set_xlabel("group 2", labelpad = 25)
main_bottom.set_ylabel("group 2", labelpad = 25)

fig.show()

Resulting in

Some of it can be achieved with fig labels. If this can already be achieved, we could add it to the docs, if not we can add it.

[syrte]

Try this:

fig, axs = pplt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, sharex=False, spanx=True)
axs[0].format(xlabel='row1')
axs[2].format(xlabel='row2')

I believe this is what you are looking for.

[cvanelteren]

Ideally I would like to format subfigures. What I am getting at is how would I get a spanning label for this:

import proplot as plt

layout = [
    [1, 2, 5],
    [3, 4, 5]
]

fig, ax = plt.subplots(layout, sharex = True, figsize = (5,3))
ax[:4].format(xlabel = "grouped label")
ax[-1].format(xlabel = "separate label")

[cvanelteren]

It would be ideal if we could index into the axis that I wish to format and making them shared in a smart way without having it apply to all subplots. The work around is to make everything manually fit where you can overlay dummy axes -- but this gets pretty complicated as the complexity of the graph grows, but in principle is possible.

[KingRyu1998]

helpful examples, appreciate it