title: Preserving the xticks in multiple bar plots in matplotlib
body: <p>1) I am not able to see the text-based xticks which are stored as list in the variable x. When I have only one single column based bar plot, I can see the xticks as text but not for more. </p>
  
  <p>2)how can I control the font properties of xticks and the values in y axis?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import pylab as pl
  import numpy as np
  
  #load text and columns into different variables
  data = np.genfromtxt('a', names=True, dtype=None, usecols=("X", "N2", "J2", "V2", "asd", "xyz"))  
  x = data['X'] 
  n = data['N2'] 
  j = data['J2'] 
  v = data['V2'] 
  
  #make x axis string based labels
  r=np.arange(1,25,1.5)
  plt.xticks(r,x)             #make sure dimension of x and n matches
  
  plt.figure(figsize=(3.2,2), dpi=300, linewidth=3.0)
  ax = plt.subplot(111)
  ax.bar(r,v,width=0.9,color='red',edgecolor='black', lw=0.5, align='center')
  plt.axhline(y=0,linewidth=1.0,color='black')   #horizontal line at y=0
  plt.axis([0.5,16.5,-0.4,0.20])
  
  ax.bar(r,j,width=0.6,color='green',edgecolor='black', lw=0.5, align='center')
  ax.bar(r,n,width=0.3,color='blue',edgecolor='black', lw=0.5, align='center')
  
  plt.axhline(y=0,linewidth=1,color='black')   #horizontal line at y=0
  
  plt.axis([0.5,24.5,-0.36,0.15])
  
  plt.savefig('fig',dpi=300,format='png',orientation='landscape')
  </code></pre>