PR summary

This pull request responds to Issue#9373 by implementing a new tick locator based on Talbot, Lin, and Hanrahan's extended Wilkinson tick-placing algorithm. It's primary method of tick placement relies on balancing four main criteria:

1. Simplicity: biases tick location in favor of round numbers
2. Coverage: biases tick locations in favor of completely covering the provided data range
3. Density: biases tick number towards matching provided target number of ticks
4. Legibility: biases tick formatting in favor of readability

While this implementation could be improved upon (for example, by making the legibility score change the formatting of the graphics, etc.), I think this serves as a good jumping off point for anyone who wants to expand it.

The primary benefits of including this tick locator would be its ease of customizability. By simply changing number of ticks, step preferences, and weights of the four main criteria, the user can tune this locator in any method they please, allowing easy customization without taking away ease of understanding.

Here's an example of the tick locator in action:

importmatplotlib.pyplotaspltimportmatplpotlib.tickerastickerfig,ax=plt.subplots()ax.plot([0,10], [0,10])ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.WilkinsonLocator(target_ticks=5))ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.WilkinsonLocator(target_ticks=5))plt.show()

Let me know if you need anything else!

PR checklist

• "closes #0000" is in the body of the PR description tolink the related issue
• new and changed code istested
• Plotting related features are demonstrated in anexample
• New Features andAPI Changes are noted with adirective and release note
• Documentation complies withgeneral anddocstring guidelines