title: How to disable bbox_inches='tight' when working with matplotlib inline in ipython notebook
body: <p>When work with matplotlib inline backend in ipython notebook, the default behavior is using bbox_inches='tight' to generate the embedded png image internally via savefig(). This eliminates the whitespace around the axes and is great in most cases.</p>
  
  <p>However, sometimes one might want to (temporarily) disable this feature, for example, when (s)he wants to manually keep two figures vertically aligned (assume that we don't want to use subplot here):</p>
  
  <pre><code>%matplotlib inline
  from pylab import *
  plot(rand(100))
  subplots_adjust(left=0.2) # Has no effect with inline, but works as expected with qt
  figure()
  plot(rand(100)*10000) # Will result in a larger left margin for this figure...
  subplots_adjust(left=0.2)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So how to disable this behavior? Thanks~</p>
  
  <h2>EDIT</h2>
  
  <p>To make the issue involved here more explicit (thanks to Anzel), the 2nd figure, due to more digits to be displayed in yticklabels, will have larger left margin (and smaller right margin) after automatic layout adjustment triggered by the bbox_inches='tight' option in savefig(), which is internally called by notebook to generate the embedded png output. It will effectively truncate any additional space I intentionally make with subplots_adjust(), so that the 2nd figure will seem to be shifted to the right, and not vertically "aligned" with the 1st figure.</p>
  
  <p>It is easy to see what I mean---just try the code snippet above:)</p>
  
  <p>The reason why I'm not using subplot/subplots here (see comments to Anzel's answer) is that in this particular case, the two figures are acutally themselves composed of tens of small subplots, plus some additional formatting/labeling. Merging them into one larger array of subplots is not trivial...</p>