Logarithmic axis ticks include mysterious "2 5" between each tick.

[jmckib]

When an axis of type log is stretched wide enough by increasing html width, the numbers "2 5" appear as smaller ticks between each larger tick. Here's a picture, look at the x-axis:

Also here's a codepen link to produce the picture. https://codepen.io/anon/pen/VXOVyX I created it by taking the codepen link from the log documentation and increasing the div width to 1000px https://plot.ly/javascript/log-plot/

Are those "2 5" expected? If so, what do they mean, and is there a way to remove them?

[alexcjohnson]

Yes, those are expected - they're labeling 2 and 5 times the previous power of 10. Zoom in a bit more and you'll see 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

You can get rid of these labels, and the lines that they're labeling, using xaxis: {dtick: 1}, the downside then is it won't auto-adjust as you zoom in or out - see https://plot.ly/javascript/reference/#layout-xaxis-dtick for full details.

[jmckib]

@alexcjohnson Thanks, setting dtick to 1 got rid of the subticks.

[nite]

It'd be nice to be able to keep the gridline but remove the confusing interim tick labels - are you aware of any way of doing this @alexcjohnson ?

[alexcjohnson]

Unless you want to do something hacky with tickvals and ticktext, I don't think there's a way to get rid of these labels. Would need to be a new feature to make this happen easily and dynamically.

[nite]

Thanks @alexcjohnson - is there any way to control their style & hide them using css? (not obvious to me). Is there any way to influence the decision on how many are displayed (eg. in the codepen above, 2 & 5 appear but then they all appear when you zoom in).

Ideally, looking for something more like this plot here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale#/media/File:Log-log_plot_example.svg
I'd imaging this is a standard in matplotlib / matlab?

Incidentally, I'm also driving this from python, using plotly dash currently.

[nite]

I've got an even hackier solution to this:

text[style*="font-size: 9px"] {
    font-size: 0 !important;
}

https://codepen.io/nite/pen/xMapqL?editors=0110

[danielbellsa]

Python:

fig.update_xaxes(dtick=1)
fig.update_yaxes(dtick=1)

[ericphanson]

I found tickformat = "~r" useful for this issue, to show the minor tick labels as expected