[Matplotlib-users] On changing the default tick pad

Whilst agreeing with Kaushik's sentiments on the greatness of 
matplotlib, I thought his example plot nicely illustrates a layout wart 
that I think is easily fixed by changing the default xtick.major.pad, 
xtick.minor.pad, ytick.major.pad and ytick.minor.pad values from 4 to 6.
As well as preventing the x- and y-axis labels running into each other 
in Kaushik's example, the most common case of a 2D plot with 0 lower 
bound on both the x- and y-axes [e.g. plot(rand(10))] looks better with 
the default font when pad=6. Just to bolster my case, according to the 
gestalt theory "Law of Proximity" 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology>, the labels, which are 
currently closer to each other at the axis intersection than to the axes 
themselves become separated enough from one another so that they become 
visually associated with the axes in this region.

As an aside, I went looking for Matlab plotting examples and some appear 
to match the pad=4 padding whereas others are more like pad=6.

Of course I shall change this in my matplotlibrc file. I just thought 
I'd see if I could provoke a revolution,

Gary R.