[Matplotlib-users] fig.legend method and axes.legend method behaves differently?

[Henry east]

Hi,
I tried to make a plot with two subplots but only one legend since the two subplots express the same set of information.
I put the legend outside of the two subplots for better interpretation. I have found that by using fig.legend instead of
the ax.legend method. In the saved plot, the legend box are just cut off.

I tried to fix this by using bbox_extra_artists argument in the savefig method, following the instruction
here<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10101700/moving-matplotlib-legend-outside-of-the-axis-makes-it-cutoff-by-the-figure-box>.
But it does not work. The following code illustrate the problem,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib as mpl

x = np.arange(-5, 5, 0.1)
y1 = np.sin(x)
y2 = np.cos(x)

y3 = np.sin(2*x)
y4 = np.cos(2*x)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(ncols=1, nrows=2, figsize=(10, 6))

ax1.plot(x, y1, label='sin')
ax1.plot(x, y2, label='cos')

ax2.plot(x, y3, label='sin')
ax2.plot(x, y4, label='cos')

handles, labels = ax1.get_legend_handles_labels()

# legend = fig.legend(handles, labels, loc='lower left', ncol=2, frameon=False,
#               bbox_to_anchor=(0.12, 0.88))
# plt.savefig('test.jpg', bbox_extra_artists=(legend,), bbox_inches='tight')

legend = ax1.legend(handles, labels, ncol=2, frameon=False,
                    loc='lower left', bbox_to_anchor=(-0.01, 1.0))
plt.savefig('test.jpg', bbox_inches='tight')


If I use the above code, the generated image is fine. But if I use the commented code instead, the legend is gone in the generated image.
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