It appears that when there is a path outside the plotting limits then not all the path coordinates get plotted. When I run the code below withxmax=1.1 versusxmax=1.0, the axvspan is plotted wrong in latex. Inspection of the pgf file for the two versions ofxmax indicates that a\pgfpathlineto command is missing in thexmax=1.1 version. I've traced it to_print_pgf_path() in the backend and the linefor points, code in path.iter_segments(transform, clip=clip): which is asking for clipped points.

Python Code

import matplotlib.pyplot as pltfig = plt.figure()ax = fig.add_subplot(111)ax.plot([0,1],[0,1],'-k')ax.set_xlim(0,1)ax.axvspan(xmin=0.5, xmax=1.1)fig.savefig('test.pgf')

Latex code

\documentclass {article}\usepackage{pgf}\begin{document}    \begin{figure}        \centering        \input{test.pgf}    \end{figure}\end{document

Here is a pic of the result after compiled with latex (pdflatex or xelatex)

However, saving to .pdf produces the right result