.. _howto-ticks:

Configure the tick widths

Wherever possible, it is recommended to use the :meth:`~.axes.Axes.tick_params`

or :meth:`~.axis.Axis.set_tick_params` methods to modify tick properties::

For more control of tick properties that are not provided by the above methods,

it is important to know that in Matplotlib, the ticks are *markers*. All

:class:`~matplotlib.lines.Line2D` objects support a line (solid, dashed, etc)

and a marker (circle, square, tick). The tick width is controlled by the

``"markeredgewidth"`` property, so the above effect can also be achieved by::

The other properties that control the tick marker, and all markers,

are ``markerfacecolor``, ``markeredgecolor``, ``markeredgewidth``,

``markersize``. For more information on configuring ticks, see

:ref:`axis-container` and :ref:`tick-container`.

.. _date-index-plots:

Skip dates where there is no data

When plotting time series, e.g., financial time series, one often wants to

leave out days on which there is no data, e.g., weekends. By passing in

dates on the x-xaxis, you get large horizontal gaps on periods when there

is not data. The solution is to pass in some proxy x-data, e.g., evenly

sampled indices, and then use a custom formatter to format these as dates.

:doc:`/gallery/text_labels_and_annotations/date_index_formatter` demonstrates

how to use an 'index formatter' to achieve the desired plot.