Hello, I have been putting some initial effort on implementing a new Legend class which has paddings in canvas unit. A related post is http://www.mail-archive.com/mat...@li.../msg08560.html My current implementation has a same functionality as the old one (an example figure attached), but I haven't implemented a new features like multicolumn option yet. Basic idea is to create a new version of the Legend class with a same interface to the current one. Eric's original suggestion was to use some optional kwarg to choose the version. But I found this approach does not work well unless we also set the meaningful default values in the rc file. For example, the current "legend.axespad" in rcsetup.py is 0.02 which is in axes unit. But this need to be ~10 (if given in points) or ~0.5 (if given in fraction of the font size) in the new class. One option I can think of is a work flow something like below. import matplotlib.legend matplotlib.legend.use_newclass(True) # this simply override the rcParam with new default values and bind legend.Legend to the new class. # do some stuff matplotlib.legend.use_newclass(False) # recover the original rcParam and rebind legend.Legend back to the original class So, how do others think? Any idea or suggestion is welcomed. Regards, -JJ