Simplify creation of publication-quality figures based on matplotlib.
matplotlib is a powerful package for plotting in python. It allows very detailed control over every possible aspect of a plot. However, a lot of the provided functionality is combersome to use and impossible to remember. For specific use cases, however, a lot of this can be hidden in dedicated functions. The plottools package does this for scientific publications and adds a number of functions to matplotlib axes and figure classes.
The second design goal of the plottol package is separation of content and design. We know this from LaTeX documents. A good LaTeX document contains only the text and the logical structure. The actual layout (fonts, format of the sections, etc.) can then be entirely controlled by the header without touching the text. Equivalently, python scripts generating various figures should only provide the data and necessary annotation like axes labels. It's design should be controllable by a single central function or module that is used by all the scripts generating the figures. matplotlib's rc settings are a big step in this direction but do not completely reach this goal. The plottools package expands on this. See the styles module for details.
The following modules are provided by the plottools package:
styles: layout settings and plot styles.colors: color palettes and tools for manipulating colors. More...figure: size and margins of a figure.spines: modify the appearance of spines. More...ticks: setting tick locations and formats. More...labels: annotate axis with label and unit and align axes labels.arrows: arrows.axes: mark axes with a label and simplify common axis labels.insets: insets made easy. More...scalebars: labeled scale bars. More...significance: indicating statsitical significance.
See documentation in the modules for more infos.
For all demos simply run
python demos.py
For demos of the individual modules in plottools/,
run, for example,
python -m plottools.spines
Read our guidline for preparing figures for your next paper manuscript or thesis.