Do any of the other add_* methods call autoscale? Auto-scaling is (I think) not a cheap operation and it is an intentional design decision to not call auto-scaling every time a patch is added.

I think if the user is reaching down to use 'low level' methods to add artists, it is the users responsibility to auto-scale the axes.

I am 👎 on merging this.

@tacaswell thanks for looking into this. I don't think any other method does. I was just hoping that it would be the case, since for usual plotting operations, the axis are scaled automatically and thought of this patch on someone's suggestion (http://stackoverflow.com/a/26892390/59634).. Is plt.axis('scaled') the way to go about it then?

Is this officially documented somewhere - the design rationale for this? Thanks much.

@mdboom @efiring Do you know if this is documented someplace?

This is vaguely related the auto-redraw issues when working with the OO api. The hierarchy needs some clean way (decorators, callbacks?, ??) to keep track of when possibly expensive operations (like redrawing, auto-scaling, ect) are done and do them once when the UI is idle for interactive use and only when explicitly called for scripting/embedding usage.

This is also related to some issues with getting different limits if you set log-scale before/after plotting with scatter.

Closing as while this is an issue, I don't think this is the fix.