<p dir="auto">if you save a contourf in pdf format, you see the thin white line contours.<br>
This is well described in this question and I think the fix makes sense too.<br>
<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/32911283" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/a/32911283</a></p>
<p dir="auto">is it possible to implement it with an extra argument in contourf?<br>
thanks!</p>
<p dir="auto">This is the underlying problem raised in <a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load title" data-id="6572843" data-permission-text="Title is private" data-url="https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/1178" data-hovercard-type="pull_request" data-hovercard-url="/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/1178/hovercard" href="https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/1178">#1178</a>.<br>
It is illustrated by the test below; note that boundary anomalies are visible in all forms--agg on the screen, and pdf and svg displayed with a viewer--but in different places depending on the viewer and the size of the figure as rendered.<br>
Note that the colorbar is rendered using pcolormesh, which has its own renderer with agg but otherwise is handled by draw_path_collection.</p>
<pre class="notranslate">import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

z = np.arange(150)
z.shape = (10,15)

fig, axs = plt.subplots(2,2)

ax = axs[0,0]
cs0 = ax.contourf(z, 20)
cbar0 = fig.colorbar(cs0, ax=ax)

ax = axs[0,1]
cs1 = ax.contourf(z, 20, alpha=0.3)
cbar1 = fig.colorbar(cs1, ax=ax)

ax = axs[1,0]
im2 = ax.imshow(z, interpolation='nearest')
cbar2 = fig.colorbar(im2, ax=ax)

ax = axs[1,1]
im3 = ax.imshow(z, interpolation='nearest', alpha=0.3)
cbar3 = fig.colorbar(im3, ax=ax)

plt.savefig("test1.pdf")
plt.savefig("test1.svg")
plt.show()
</pre>