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matplotlib Plotting Cookbook

Cookbook

Alexandre Devert
March 2014

Discover how easy it can be to create great scientific visualizations with Python. This cookbook includes over sixty matplotlib recipes together with clarifying explanations to ensure you can produce plots of high quality.

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Book Details

ISBN 139781849513265

Paperback222 pages

About This Book

Learn plotting with self-contained, practical examples that cover common use cases
Build your own solutions with the orthogonal recipes
Learn to customize and combine basic plots to make sophisticated figures

Who This Book Is For

If you are an engineer or scientist who wants to create great visualizations with Python, rather than yet another specialized language, this is the book for you. While there are several very competent plotting packages, matplotlib is “just” a Python module. Thus, if you know some Python already, you will feel at home from the first steps on. In case you are an application writer, you won't be left out since the integration of matplotlib is covered.

Chapter 1: First Steps

Introduction

Installing matplotlib

Plotting one curve

Using NumPy

Plotting multiple curves

Plotting curves from file data

Plotting points

Plotting bar charts

Plotting multiple bar charts

Plotting stacked bar charts

Plotting back-to-back bar charts

Plotting pie charts

Plotting histograms

Plotting boxplots

Plotting triangulations

Chapter 2: Customizing the Color and Styles

Introduction

Defining your own colors

Using custom colors for scatter plots

Using custom colors for bar charts

Using custom colors for pie charts

Using custom colors for boxplots

Using colormaps for scatter plots

Using colormaps for bar charts

Controlling a line pattern and thickness

Controlling a fill pattern

Controlling a marker's style

Controlling a marker's size

Creating your own markers

Getting more control over markers

Creating your own color scheme

Chapter 3: Working with Annotations

Introduction

Adding a title

Using LaTeX-style notations

Adding a label to each axis

Adding text

Adding arrows

Adding a legend

Adding a grid

Adding lines

Adding shapes

Controlling tick spacing

Controlling tick labeling

Chapter 4: Working with Figures

Introduction

Compositing multiple figures

Scaling both the axes equally

Setting an axis range

Setting the aspect ratio

Inserting subfigures

Using a logarithmic scale

Using polar coordinates

Chapter 5: Working with a File Output

Introduction

Generating a PNG picture file

Handling transparency

Controlling the output resolution

Generating PDF or SVG documents

Handling multiple-page PDF documents

Chapter 6: Working with Maps

Introduction

Visualizing the content of a 2D array

Adding a colormap legend to a figure

Visualizing nonuniform 2D data

Visualizing a 2D scalar field

Visualizing contour lines

Visualizing a 2D vector field

Visualizing the streamlines of a 2D vector field

Chapter 7: Working with 3D Figures

Introduction

Creating 3D scatter plots

Creating 3D curve plots

Plotting a scalar field in 3D

Plotting a parametric 3D surface

Embedding 2D figures in a 3D figure

Creating a 3D bar plot

Chapter 8: User Interface

Introduction

Making a user-controllable plot

Integrating a plot to a Tkinter user interface

Integrating a plot to a wxWidgets user interface

Integrating a plot to a GTK user interface

Integrating a plot in a Pyglet application

What You Will Learn

Discover how to create all the common plots you need
Enrich your plots with annotations and sophisticated legends
Take control of your plots and master colors, linestyle, and scales
Add a dimension to your plots and go 3D
Integrate your graphics into your applications
Automate your work and generate a large batch of graphics
Create interactive plots with matplotlib
Combine your plots to create sophisticated visualizations

In Detail

matplotlib is part of the Scientific Python modules collection. matplotlib provides a large library of customizable plots and a comprehensive set of backends. It tries to make easy things easy and hard things possible. You can generate plots, add dimensions to the plots, and also make the plots interactive with just a few lines of code with matplotlib. Also, matplotlib integrates well with all common GUI modules.

This book is a head-first, hands-on journey into matplotlib, the complete and definite plotting package for Python. You will learn about the basic plots, how to customize them, and combine them to make sophisticated figures. Along with basic plots, you will also learn to make professional scientific plots.

In this book, you will start with the common figures that are offered by most plotting packages. You will learn how to add annotations, and play with styles, colors, scales, and shapes so that you can add personality and visual punch to your graphics. You will also see how to combine several graphics. With this book you will learn how to create sophisticated visualizations with simple code. Finally, you can make your plots interactive.

After reading "matplotlib Plotting Cookbook", you will be able to create the highest quality plots.

Authors

Alexandre Devert

Alexandre Devert is a scientist, currently busy solving problems and making tools for molecular biologists. Before this, he used to teach data mining, software engineering, and research in numerical optimization. He is an enthusiastic Python coder as well and never gets enough of it!