Comment by prennert
3 days ago
Matplotlib is a bit painful. Often seaborn will work quicker, especially when using Pandas dataframes with proper column names and seaborn compatible layout.
Its annoying that you cannot create a broken axis out-of-the box, but I am sure you can wrap this to make your own convenience function: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figu...
That link was what I referred to after Googling, but in my case I need the width of the left part and the right part to be different, which requires setting width_ratios in the subplots and adjusting the slope of the hacky lines used to draw the broken axis symbol. seaborn also would not help in this exact case.
There is a package by some nice guy: https://github.com/bendichter/brokenaxes just to do the broken axis. But not being built-in in Anaconda is already an annoyance, and in my case it generates a figure with a ugly x-label.
I ended up letting ChatGPT generate the code for me with the two required hacks. I simply need the figure in the minimal amount of time and with the least mental bandwidth, so I can focus on the science and catch the conference deadline. Origin is a very "over-engineered" piece of software, but hey getting a broken axis is so simple (https://www.originlab.com/doc/Origin-Help/AxesRef-Breaks ). Sometimes the "over-engineering" is necessary to minimize users' pain.