Christopher Graves reported this on the mailing list:

I do not think this is the expected behavior. First, run the following:

from pylab import *

plot([0,3],[0.2,0.7])

ax1 = gca()

ax1.set_yscale('log')

gca().yaxis.set_major_formatter(FormatStrFormatter('$%g$'))

#ax2 = ax1.twiny()

#ax2.set_xlim(ax1.get_xlim())

show()

You will see that the y-axis is log10rithmic and axis labels are 0.1 and 1 rather than 10^-1 and 10^0, due to the use of set_major_formatter().

Now uncomment the 2 commented lines and run it again. It seems that upon applying a twiny(), the set_major_formatter() action is removed and the y-axis is now displayed as 10^-1 and 10^0. Or more likely, the y-axis is "overwritten" with a new y-axis present in ax2. One can add another gca().yaxis.set_major_formatter(FormatStrFormatter('$%g$')) before the show() and it works as intended. However, it seems like unexpected behavior to "lose" the formatting when twinning the axis to add a secondary x-axis. Any advice or agreement that this could be a bug?

Best,

Chris