title: Change Spyder and Matplotlib figure size for saved plots only
body: <p>I would like to view matplotlib plots inside Spyders IPython console in one size and save figures to a multipage PDF in a different size.</p>
  
  <p>Currently I set the figure size as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>plt.rc('axes', grid=True)
  plt.rc('figure', figsize=(12, 8))
  plt.rc('legend', fancybox=True, framealpha=1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I plot some figures and save them to a list for saving a PDF later on. This works just fine when used alone. The plots are approriately sized for viewing in Spyder IPython console.</p>
  
  <p>At the end of my script I have a loop to go through each of the figures I want to save. In here I want to set the layout and figure size exactly for better printing on an A3 paper.</p>
  
  <pre><code>with PdfPages('multi.pdf') as pdf:
      for fig in figs:
          fig.tight_layout()
          fig.set_size_inches(420/25.4, 297/25.4)
          pdf.savefig(figure=fig)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output PDF is just like I want it to be, but the problem is with the plots shown inside Spyder. Changing the figure size while saving also affects the plots viewed inside Spyder. And using the size of an A3  makes the plots way too big.</p>
  
  <p>So the question is: How do I change the size of saved PDF figures without changing the size of figures shown inside Spyder?</p>