title: Setting the size of the plotting canvas in Matplotlib
body: <p>I would like Matplotlib/Pyplot to generate plots with a consistent canvas size. That is, the figures can well have different sizes to accomodate the axis descriptions, but the plotting area (the rectangle within which the curves are drawn) should always have the same size.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a simple way to achieve that? The option figsize of pyplot.figure() seems to set the overall size of the figure, not that of the canvas, so I get a different canvas size whenever the axis description occupies more or less space.</p>