I can remove the ticks with
ax.set_xticks([])
ax.set_yticks([])
but this removes the labels as well. Any way I can plot the tick labels but not the ticks and the spine
You can set the tick length to 0 using tick_params
(http://matplotlib.org/api/axes_api.html#matplotlib.axes.Axes.tick_params):
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1],[1])
ax.tick_params(axis=u'both', which=u'both',length=0)
plt.show()
You can also use
ax.xaxis.set_tick_params(...)
instead of, e.g.,ax.tick_params(axis='x', ...)
. The former is a bit more object oriented-ey.