This style guide helps the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) creates consistent plots and images across the whole collaboration. It summarizes a set of choices and recommandataions for plotting and visualizing data.
Since version 1.4 (released in August 2014), matplotlib introduce a
style module to manage stylesheets. This allows users to select
different plotting styles by a single command
plt.style.use(['dark_background', 'presentation'])
We strongly encourage matplotlib users in the EHT collaboration (EHTC) to take advantage of the matplotlib style module. Specifically, if a plotting styles, e.g., linewidth, needs to be adjust globally, user should consider setting
lines.linewidth : 3
instead of setting it manually in a function call
plt.plot(x, y, linewidth=3)
To allow flexible compositions of different matplotlib styles, it is useful to split matplotlib style sheets into two classes: plotting styles and color palettes.
The plotting style stylesheets should focus on the presentation of different plotting elements, such as direction of tickmarks (inside or outside), presentation of axes, line thickness.
The color palette stylesheets should focus on the color of different plotting elements. It is most useful for creating plots that go into presentations, which can use different color palette themselves.