I can't believe that this is so complicated but I tried and googled for a while now. I just want to analyse my scatter plot with a few graphical features. For starters, I want to add simply a line. So, I have a few (4) points and like in this plot [1] I want to add a line to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_space-2.png [1] Now, this won't work. And frankly, the documentation-examples-gallery combo and content of matplotlib is a bad source for information. My code is based upon a simple scatter plot from the gallery: # definitions for the axes left, width = 0.1, 0.85 #0.65 bottom, height = 0.1, 0.85 #0.65 bottom_h = left_h = left+width+0.02 rect_scatter = [left, bottom, width, height] # start with a rectangular Figure fig = plt.figure(1, figsize=(8,8)) axScatter = plt.axes(rect_scatter) # the scatter plot: p1 = axScatter.scatter(x[0], y[0], c='blue', s = 70) p2 = axScatter.scatter(x[1], y[1], c='green', s = 70) p3 = axScatter.scatter(x[2], y[2], c='red', s = 70) p4 = axScatter.scatter(x[3], y[3], c='yellow', s = 70) p5 = axScatter.plot([1,2,3], "r--") plt.legend([p1, p2, p3, p4, p5], [names[0], names[1], names[2], names[3], "Random guess"], loc = 2) # now determine nice limits by hand: binwidth = 0.25 xymax = np.max( [np.max(np.fabs(x)), np.max(np.fabs(y))] ) lim = ( int(xymax/binwidth) + 1) * binwidth axScatter.set_xlim( (-lim, lim) ) axScatter.set_ylim( (-lim, lim) ) xText = axScatter.set_xlabel('FPR / Specificity') yText = axScatter.set_ylabel('TPR / Sensitivity') bins = np.arange(-lim, lim + binwidth, binwidth) plt.show() Everything works, except the p5 which is a line. Now how is this supposed to work? What's good practice here?