A log of changes to the most recent version of Matplotlib that affect the outward-facing API. If updating Matplotlib breaks your scripts, this list may help you figure out what caused the breakage and how to fix it by updating your code. For API changes in older versions see :doc:`api_changes_old`.
For new features that were added to Matplotlib, see :ref:`whats-new`.
This pages lists API changes for the most recent version of Matplotlib.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 api_changes_old
Note
The list below is a table of contents of individual files from the 'next_api_changes' folder. When a release is made
- The full text list below should be moved into its own file in 'prev_api_changes'
- All the files in 'next_api_changes' should be moved to the bottom of this page
- This note, and the toctree below should be commented out
.. toctree:: :glob: :maxdepth: 1 next_api_changes/*
.tight_layout.auto_adjust_subplotpars can return None
now if the new
subplotparams will collapse axes to zero width or height. This prevents
tight_layout
from being executed. Similarly
.tight_layout.get_tight_layout_figure will return None.
Matplotlib 3 only supports python 3.5 and higher.
Failure to load backend modules (macosx
on non-framework builds and
gtk3
when running headless) now raises ImportError (instead of
RuntimeError and TypeError, respectively).
Third-party backends that integrate with an interactive framework are now
encouraged to define the required_interactive_framework
global value to one
of the following values: "qt5", "qt4", "gtk3", "wx", "tk", or "macosx". This
information will be used to determine whether it is possible to switch from a
backend to another (specifically, whether they use the same interactive
framework).
.Axes.hist2d now uses ~.Axes.pcolormesh instead of ~.Axes.pcolorfast, which will improve the handling of log-axes. Note that the returned image now is of type ~.matplotlib.collections.QuadMesh instead of ~.matplotlib.image.AxesImage.
For Matplotlib 3.0, all artists are now included in the bounding box returned by .matplotlib.axes.Axes.get_tightbbox.
.matplotlib.axes.Axes.get_tightbbox adds a new kwarg bbox_extra_artists
to manually specify the list of artists on the axes to include in the
tight bounding box calculation.
Layout tools like .Figure.tight_layout, constrained_layout
,
and fig.savefig('fname.png', bbox_inches="tight")
use
.matplotlib.axes.Axes.get_tightbbox to determine the bounds of each axes on
a figure and adjust spacing between axes.
In Matplotlib 2.2 get_tightbbox
started to include legends made on the
axes, but still excluded some other artists, like text that may overspill an
axes. This has been expanded to include all artists.
This new default may be overridden in either of three ways:
- Make the artist to be excluded a child of the figure, not the axes. E.g.,
call
fig.legend()
instead ofax.legend()
(perhaps using ~.matplotlib.axes.Axes.get_legend_handles_labels to gather handles and labels from the parent axes). - If the artist is a child of the axes, set the artist property
artist.set_in_layout(False)
. - Manually specify a list of artists in the new kwarg
bbox_extra_artists
.
Text.set_text when passed a string value of None
would set the
string to "None"
, so subsequent calls to Text.get_text would return
the ambiguous "None"
string.
This change sets text objects passed None
to have empty strings, so that
Text.get_text returns an empty string.
They previously returned an array. Returning a tuple is consistent with the behavior for 2D axes.
i.e., it behaves case-insensitively on Windows only.
These arguments were renamed in 2.0 to x
/ y
following the change of the
default alignment from edge
to center
.
- Passing
style='comma'
to :meth:`~matplotlib.axes.Axes.ticklabel_format` was never supported. It now raisesValueError
like all other unsupported styles, rather thanNotImplementedError
. - Passing the undocumented
xmin
orxmax
arguments to :meth:`~matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_xlim` would silently override theleft
andright
arguments. :meth:`~matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_ylim` and the 3D equivalents (e.g. :meth:`~mpl_toolkits.axes.Axes3D.set_zlim3d`) had a corresponding problem. The_min
and_max
arguments are now deprecated, and aTypeError
will be raised if they would override the earlier limit arguments.
:meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.margins` and :meth:`mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.Axes3D.margins`
no longer accept arbitrary keywords. TypeError
will therefore be raised
if unknown kwargs are passed; previously they would be silently ignored.
If too many positional arguments are passed, TypeError
will be raised
instead of ValueError
, for consistency with other call-signature violations.
Axes3D.margins
now raises TypeError
instead of emitting a deprecation
warning if only two positional arguments are passed. To supply only x
and
y
margins, use keyword arguments.
PEP 3102 describes keyword-only arguments, which allow Matplotlib
to provide explicit call signatures - where we previously used
*args, **kwargs
and kwargs.pop
, we can now expose named
arguments. In some places, unknown kwargs were previously ignored but
now raise TypeError
because **kwargs
has been removed.
- :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.stem` no longer accepts unknown keywords,
and raises
TypeError
instead of emitting a deprecation. - :meth:`matplotlib.axex.Axes.stem` now raises TypeError when passed unhandled positional arguments. If two or more arguments are passed (ie X, Y, [linefmt], ...) and Y cannot be cast to an array, an error will be raised instead of treating X as Y and Y as linefmt.
- :meth:`mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider.SubPlotDivider` raises
TypeError
instead ofException
when passed unknown kwargs.
The decorators and classes in matplotlib.testing.decorators no longer
destroy the warnings filter on exit. Instead, they restore the warnings
filter that existed before the test started using warnings.catch_warnings
.
The FigureManagerPdf, FigureManagerPS, and FigureManagerSVG classes, which were previously empty subclasses of FigureManagerBase (i.e., not adding or overriding any attribute or method), are now direct aliases for FigureManagerBase.
When called with preview=False
, .image.thumbnail previously returned an
figure whose canvas class was set according to the output file extension. It
now returns a figure whose canvas class is the base FigureCanvasBase (and
relies on FigureCanvasBase.print_figure) to handle the canvas switching
properly).
As a side effect of this change, .image.thumbnail now also supports .ps, .eps, and .svgz output.
.FuncAnimation now draws artists returned by the user- function according to their zorder when using blitting, instead of using the order in which they are being passed. However, note that only zorder of passed artists will be respected, as they are drawn on top of any existing artists (see #11369).
Selection of contour levels is now the same for contour and contourf; previously, for contour, levels outside the data range were deleted. (Exception: if no contour levels are found within the data range, the levels attribute is replaced with a list holding only the minimum of the data range.)
When contour is called with levels specified as a target number rather than a list, and the 'extend' kwarg is used, the levels are now chosen such that some data typically will fall in the extended range.
When contour is called with a LogNorm or a LogLocator, it will now select colors using the geometric mean rather than the arithmetic mean of the contour levels.
A bug was fixed where the last row and column of data in ~.Axes.axes.streamplot were being dropped.
The default value of the tick locator for dates, .dates.AutoDateLocator
kwarg interval_multiples was set to False
which leads to not-nice
looking automatic ticks in many instances. The much nicer
interval_multiples=True
is the new default. See below to get the
old behavior back:
.. plot:: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import datetime import matplotlib.dates as mdates t0 = datetime.datetime(2009, 8, 20, 1, 10, 12) tf = datetime.datetime(2009, 8, 20, 1, 42, 11) fig, axs = plt.subplots(1, 2, constrained_layout=True) ax = axs[0] ax.axhspan(t0, tf, facecolor="blue", alpha=0.25) ax.set_ylim(t0 - datetime.timedelta(minutes=3), tf + datetime.timedelta(minutes=3)) ax.set_title('NEW DEFAULT') ax = axs[1] ax.axhspan(t0, tf, facecolor="blue", alpha=0.25) ax.set_ylim(t0 - datetime.timedelta(minutes=3), tf + datetime.timedelta(minutes=3)) # old behavior locator = mdates.AutoDateLocator(interval_multiples=False, ) ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(locator) ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.AutoDateFormatter(locator)) ax.set_title('OLD') plt.show()
.Axes.get_position used to return the original position unless a
draw had been triggered or .Axes.apply_aspect had been called, even
if the kwarg original was set to False
. Now .Axes.apply_aspect
is called so ax.get_position()
will return the new modified position.
To get the old behavior use ax.get_position(original=True)
.
Colorbar ticks now adjust for the size of the colorbar if the colorbar is made from a mappable that is not a contour or doesn't have a BoundaryNorm, or boundaries are not specified. If boundaries, etc are specified, the colorbar maintains the original behavior.
When using hexbin and plotting with a logarithmic color scale, the colorbar ticks are now correctly log scaled. Previously the tick values were linear scaled log(number of counts).
Previous behavior with the pgf backend was for text specified as black to actually be the default color of whatever was rendering the pgf file (which was of course usually black). The new behavior is that black text is black, regardless of the default color. However, this means that there is no way to fall back on the default color of the renderer.
The rc modifier functions rcdefaults, rc_file_defaults and rc_file
now ignore rcParams in the matplotlib.style.core.STYLE_BLACKLIST set. In
particular, this prevents the backend
and interactive
rcParams from
being incorrectly modified by these functions.
In particular, this implies that CallbackRegistry.callbacks[signal]
is now
a mapping of callback ids to WeakMethods (i.e., they need to be first called
with no arguments to retrieve the method itself).
The rcParam now defaults to True and is deprecated (i.e., in future versions of Maplotlib, unicode input will always be supported).
Moreover, the underlying implementation now uses \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
instead of \usepackage{ucs}\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
.
ArtistInspector.get_aliases previously returned the set of aliases as
{fullname: {alias1: None, alias2: None, ...}}
. The dict-to-None mapping
was used to simulate a set in earlier versions of Python. It has now been
replaced by a set, i.e. {fullname: {alias1, alias2, ...}}
.
This value is also stored in ArtistInspector.aliasd, which has likewise changed.
Since dateutil
and pytz
both provide time zones, and
matplotlib already depends on dateutil
, matplotlib will now use
dateutil
time zones internally and drop the redundant dependency
on pytz
. While dateutil
time zones are preferred (and
currently recommended in the Python documentation), the explicit use
of pytz
zones is still supported.
The following modules are deprecated:
- :mod:`matplotlib.compat.subprocess`. This was a python 2 workaround, but all the functionality can now be found in the python 3 standard library :mod:`subprocess`.
- :mod:`matplotlib.backends.wx_compat`. Python 3 is only compatible with wxPython 4, so support for wxPython 3 or earlier can be dropped.
The following classes, methods, functions, and attributes are deprecated:
RcParams.msg_depr
,RcParams.msg_depr_ignore
,RcParams.msg_depr_set
,RcParams.msg_obsolete
,RcParams.msg_backend_obsolete
afm.parse_afm
backend_pdf.PdfFile.texFontMap
backend_pgf.get_texcommand
backend_ps.get_bbox
backend_qt5.FigureCanvasQT.keyAutoRepeat
(directly checkevent.guiEvent.isAutoRepeat()
in the event handler to decide whether to handle autorepeated key presses).backend_qt5.error_msg_qt
,backend_qt5.exception_handler
backend_wx.FigureCanvasWx.macros
backends.pylab_setup
cbook.GetRealpathAndStat
,cbook.Locked
cbook.is_numlike
(useisinstance(..., numbers.Number)
instead),cbook.listFiles
,cbook.unicode_safe
container.Container.set_remove_method
,contour.ContourLabeler.cl
,.cl_xy
, and.cl_cvalues
dates.DateFormatter.strftime_pre_1900
,dates.DateFormatter.strftime
font_manager.TempCache
image._ImageBase.iterpnames
, use theinterpolation_names
property instead. (this affects classes that inherit from_ImageBase
including :class:`FigureImage`, :class:`BboxImage`, and :class:`AxesImage`)mathtext.unichr_safe
(usechr
instead)patches.Polygon.xy
table.Table.get_child_artists
(useget_children
instead)testing.compare.ImageComparisonTest
,testing.compare.compare_float
testing.decorators.CleanupTest
,testing.decorators.skip_if_command_unavailable
FigureCanvasQT.keyAutoRepeat
(directly checkevent.guiEvent.isAutoRepeat()
in the event handler to decide whether to handle autorepeated key presses)FigureCanvasWx.macros
_ImageBase.iterpnames
, use theinterpolation_names
property instead. (this affects classes that inherit from_ImageBase
including :class:`FigureImage`, :class:`BboxImage`, and :class:`AxesImage`)patches.Polygon.xy
texmanager.dvipng_hack_alpha
text.Annotation.arrow
- .Legend.draggable(), in favor of .Legend.set_draggable()
- (
Legend.draggable
may be reintroduced as a property in future releases)
textpath.TextToPath.tex_font_map
- :class:`matplotlib.cbook.deprecation.mplDeprecation` will be removed in future versions. It is just an alias for :class:`matplotlib.cbook.deprecation.MatplotlibDeprecationWarning`. Please use the :class:`~matplotlib.cbook.MatplotlibDeprecationWarning` directly if neccessary.
- The
matplotlib.cbook.Bunch
class has been deprecated. Instead, use types.SimpleNamespace from the standard library which provides the same functionality. Axes.mouseover_set
is now a frozenset, and deprecated. Directly manipulate the artist's.mouseover
attribute to change their mouseover status.
The following keyword arguments are deprecated:
- passing
verts
toAxes.scatter
(usemarker
instead) - passing
obj_type
tocbook.deprecated
The following call signatures are deprecated:
- passing a
wx.EvtHandler
as first argument tobackend_wx.TimerWx
The following rcParams are deprecated:
examples.directory
(usedatapath
instead)pgf.debug
(the pgf backend relies on logging)text.latex.unicode
(always True now)
- Using
(n, 3)
as marker style to specify a circle marker is deprecated. Use"o"
instead. - Using
([(x0, y0), (x1, y1), ...], 0)
as marker style to specify a custom marker path is deprecated. Use[(x0, y0), (x1, y1), ...]
instead.
The LocatableAxes
classes in toolkits have been deprecated. The base Axes
classes provide the same functionality to all subclasses, thus these mixins are
no longer necessary. Related functions have also been deprecated. Specifically:
mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider.LocatableAxesBase
: no specific replacement; use any otherAxes
-derived class directly instead.mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider.locatable_axes_factory
: no specific replacement; use any otherAxes
-derived class directly instead.mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider.Axes
: use mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.mpl_axes.Axes directly.mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider.LocatableAxes
: use mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.mpl_axes.Axes directly.mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axes_divider.Axes
: use mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axislines.Axes directly.mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axes_divider.LocatableAxes
: use mpl_toolkits.axisartist.axislines.Axes directly.
Setting or unsetting hold
(:ref:`deprecated in version 2.0<v200_deprecate_hold>`) has now
been completely removed. Matplotlib now always behaves as if hold=True
.
To clear an axes you can manually use :meth:`~.axes.Axes.cla()`,
or to clear an entire figure use :meth:`~.figure.Figure.clf()`.
Deprecated backends have been removed:
- GTKAgg
- GTKCairo
- GTK
- GDK
The following deprecated API elements have been removed:
- The deprecated methods
knownfailureif
andremove_text
have been removed from :mod:`matplotlib.testing.decorators`. - The entire contents of
testing.noseclasses
have also been removed. matplotlib.checkdep_tex
,matplotlib.checkdep_xmllint
backend_bases.IdleEvent
cbook.converter
,cbook.tostr
,cbook.todatetime
,cbook.todate
,cbook.tofloat
,cbook.toint
,cbook.unique
,cbook.is_string_like
,cbook.is_sequence_of_strings
,cbook.is_scalar
,cbook.soundex
,cbook.dict_delall
,cbook.get_split_ind
,cbook.wrap
,cbook.get_recursive_filelist
,cbook.pieces
,cbook.exception_to_str
,cbook.allequal
,cbook.alltrue
,cbook.onetrue
,cbook.allpairs
,cbook.finddir
,cbook.reverse_dict
,cbook.restrict_dict
,cbook.issubclass_safe
,cbook.recursive_remove
,cbook.unmasked_index_ranges
,cbook.Null
,cbook.RingBuffer
,cbook.Sorter
,cbook.Xlator
,font_manager.weight_as_number
,font_manager.ttfdict_to_fnames
pyplot.colors
,pyplot.spectral
rcsetup.validate_negative_linestyle
,rcsetup.validate_negative_linestyle_legacy
,testing.compare.verifiers
,testing.compare.verify
testing.decorators.knownfailureif
,testing.decorators.ImageComparisonTest.remove_text
tests.assert_str_equal
,tests.test_tinypages.file_same
texmanager.dvipng_hack_alpha
,_AxesBase.axesPatch
,_AxesBase.set_color_cycle
,_AxesBase.get_cursor_props
,_AxesBase.set_cursor_props
_ImageBase.iterpnames
FigureCanvasBase.start_event_loop_default
;FigureCanvasBase.stop_event_loop_default
;Figure.figurePatch
,FigureCanvasBase.dynamic_update
,FigureCanvasBase.idle_event
,FigureCanvasBase.get_linestyle
,FigureCanvasBase.set_linestyle
FigureCanvasQTAggBase
FigureCanvasQTAgg.blitbox
FigureCanvasTk.show
(alternative:FigureCanvasTk.draw
)FigureManagerTkAgg
(alternative:FigureManagerTk
)NavigationToolbar2TkAgg
(alternative:NavigationToolbar2Tk
)backend_wxagg.Toolbar
(alternative:backend_wxagg.NavigationToolbar2WxAgg
)RendererAgg.debug()
- passing non-numbers to
EngFormatter.format_eng
- passing
frac
toPolarAxes.set_theta_grids
- any mention of idle events
The following API elements have been removed:
backend_cairo.HAS_CAIRO_CFFI
sphinxext.sphinx_version
The matplotlib documentation used the proprietary sphinx directives .. htmlonly::, and .. latexonly::. These have been replaced with the standard sphinx directives .. only:: html and .. only:: latex. This change will not affect any users. Only downstream package maintainers, who have used the proprietary directives in their docs, will have to switch to the sphinx directives.
The symlink from lib/mpl_examples to ../examples has been removed. This is not installed as an importable package and should not affect end users, however this may require down-stream packagers to adjust. The content is still available top-level examples directory.