Original report at SourceForge, opened Thu Jan 6 10:02:52 2011

The legend of the stem plots doesn't behave as expected. The following code illustrate the problem:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [1,2,3,4,5]
y1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y2 = [5, 4, 3, 2, 1]

plt.subplot(211)
plt.plot(x, y1, 'rx-')
plt.plot(x, y2, 'bx-')
plt.legend(('a', 'b'))

plt.subplot(212)
plt.stem(x, y1, 'r')
plt.stem(x,y2, 'b')
plt.legend(('a', 'b'))

plt.savefig('stem_legend.png')

plt.show()

I expect the legend for the stem case to look similar to the plot case, however, for the stem, I get the two labels of the legend
associated with the first stem command: 'a' linked to the marker and 'b' linked to the stem line.

SourceForge Comments

On Thu Jan 6 10:08:29 2011, None wrote:

I think the right behavior should be similar to what Matlab does. I attached a file with the Matlab plot corresponding to the equivalent Matplotlib code.

SourceForge History

• On Thu Jan 6 10:06:18 2011, by None: File Added: 397833: stem_legend_matlab.png
• On Thu Jan 6 10:02:52 2011, by None: File Added: 397831: stem_legend.png