charu

charu is a wrapper around Matplotlib's pyplot that adds some trimmings and monkey patches a couple of functions.

Usage

To use charu, import it along with pyplot (which can be used as usual), e.g.,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import charu

x = np.linspace(0, 10 * np.pi, 1000)
plt.plot(x, np.sin(x))
plt.show()

Extra rcParams

charu's pyplot.rc_context() accepts a custom set of rcParams that can be used (among other things) to set the plot style and size to conform to a specific journal's requirements, e.g.,

rc = {
    # Document style can be 'aps', 'standard', etc.
    "charu.doc": "aps",

    # Make the figure a square with side equal to axis 0's length.
    "charu.square": 0,

    # Convenient alias for text.usetex.
    "charu.tex": True,

    # Set LaTeX font.  Can be 'cmbright', 'mathtime', etc.
    "charu.tex.font": "cmbright",

    # Append to the current LaTeX preamble.
    "charu.tex.preamble": "\usepackage{siunitx}",

    # Choose two-column/wider figure size.
    "charu.wide": True,
}

with plt.rc_context(rc):
    # plotting code

Crop and optimize PDFs and PNGs

Even with bbox_inches="tight" and pad_inches=0, pyplot.savefig() doesn't always properly crop the figure to the plot's bounding box. Because of this, charu includes a version of pyplot.savefig() which can be used to crop (and optimize) PDFs and PNGs. For PDFs, this requires pdfcrop and pdfsizeopt, and for PNGs, this requires mogrify (from ImageMagick) and optipng.

plt.savefig("file.pdf", crop=True, optimize=True)
plt.savefig("file.png", crop=True, optimize=True)

Generate formatted ticks and labels

The function ticklabels can be used to generate evenly-spaced ticks and labels with proper formatting for fractions.

>>> ticks, labels = charu.ticklabels(start=-2*np.pi, stop=2*np.pi, num=9, div=np.pi, divstr=r"\pi")
>>> ticks
array([-6.28318531, -4.71238898, -3.14159265, -1.57079633,  0.        ,
        1.57079633,  3.14159265,  4.71238898,  6.28318531])
>>> labels
['$-2\pi$', '$-3\pi/2$', '$-\pi$', '$-\pi/2$', '$0$', '$\pi/2$', '$\pi$', '$3\pi/2$', '$2\pi$']

License

Public domain. See the file UNLICENSE for more details.