About

The purpose of this package is to collect and provide high-quality Matplotlib styles.

Customizing the look of Matplotlib plots is relatively easy thanks to the rc parameter framework. For example, you can easily set the font for your plot using:

plt.rcParams['font.family'] = 'Georgia'

However, you may have to tweak quite a few such parameters to get a good looking plot. The present package leverages the rc parameter framework to provide presets that save you time if you want to just get a good looking plot fast.

Future versions of Matplotlib will likely include the ability to select such presets (or 'style sheets') - see matplotlib/matplotlib#2236. Once this is available, the styles in this repository will be adapted so as to be usable by the new Matplotlib framework.

Contributing

The aim of this package is to collaboratively come up with a set of high-quality styles. Please contribute styles to mpl_styles/styles.py. Simply define a function named style_<style_name> that takes no arguments, and returns a dictionary of Matplotlib rc parameter settings.

Installing

This package is still in development, but you can install the latest developer version with:

git clone https://github.com/astrofrog/mpl_styles.git
cd mpl_styles
python setup.py install

Using styles

You can either set a global style for the rest of the script:

mpl_styles.use('style_name')

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)
...

or make use of the context manager to temporarily change the style:

with mpl_styles.use('style_name'):

    fig = plt.figure()
    ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)
    ...

Available styles

The following styles are currently available:

• 'test' - a test style:

• 'white_on_black' - a style for presentations with black backgrounds

This package is under development. We are curerntly working on a set of styles! Please also contribute your own! (see Contributing above).

Fonts

Note that you will need to make sure that fonts that are needed for specific styles are present in TTF format on your system (which not all default system fonts will be). A great resource for free fonts is Google Web Fonts.

Other useful helpers

Improved Log Formatter

The default log formatter is Matplotlib is sub-optimal = it returns values such as 10^0, 10^1, etc. To use a more sensible log formatter, you can do:

from mpl_styles.formatters import LogFormatterMathtextAuto

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(LogFormatterMathtextAuto())  # for the x axis
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(LogFormatterMathtextAuto())  # for the y axis
...

and values between (and including) 0.01 and 100 will be rendered in decimal, not exponential notation. If you use the interactive pylab interface, you need to instead make the plot and then:

...
from mpl_styles.formatters import LogFormatterMathtextAuto
gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(LogFormatterMathtextAuto())  # for the x axis
gca().yaxis.set_major_formatter(LogFormatterMathtextAuto())  # for the y axis
gcf().canvas.draw()

If you make a plot with multiple subplots, you will need to run the gca()... command after making each sub-plot, and the gcf().canvas.draw() command after you are done setting all the formatters.

Credits

Package inspired from a discussion with João Alves (University of Vienna)