• Linux hypatia-pc 4.5.0-1-amd64 Fix autofmt_xdate() when using in conjunction with twinx() #1 SMP Debian 4.5.1-1 (2016-04-14) x86_64 GNU/Linux

  lsb_release -a
      No LSB modules are available.
      Distributor ID: Debian
      Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 (jessie)
      Release:    8.4
      Codename:   jessie
  

• matplotlib 1.5.2~rc2-1

• Python 2.7.11+

• installed using: sudo apt-get install -t sid python matplotlibg

Here is an example where the problem appears:

from matplotlib.pyplot import *
figure( figsize=[4,3] )
subplot( 111, xscale='log' )
plot( [1e-20,1e5], [1e-16,10] )
show()

For lack of time the following image wasn't reproduced with the above example, but came from another problem:

The right side shows the problem and the left side is my workaround which calculates some distance for a given amount of labels I want (here I wanted 5 labels or less). So it set every exponent, but every sixth integer exponent, i.e. -16,-10,-4.

It would be cool if it was fully automatic like with linear scales.