After customizing a number of parameters in my matplotlibrc file, I was able to generate figures as desired in with pyplot.show(). However, using pyplot.savefig() with the same parameters resulted in images with thicker lines and bigger fonts, even when the dpi was the same for the default figure and the saved image.

This issue was described by another user here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7906365/matplotlib-savefig-plots-different-from-show/9814313

I was able to find a solution for myself as described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7906365/matplotlib-savefig-plots-different-from-show/9814313#9814313

But, it would be really nice if a fix were built in for all the rendering backends, or, alternately, there was at least an easy way to scale paths and fonts so that savefig() and show() resulted in similar images.