Chapter 4. Advanced Matplotlib

We are about to explore some advanced aspects of Matplotlib. The topics that we are going to cover in detail are:

• Matplotlib's object-oriented interface

• Subplots and multiple figures

• Additional and shared axes

• Logarithmic scaled axes

• Date plotting with ticks formatting and locators

• Text properties, fonts, LaTeX typewriting

• Contour plots and image plotting

The basis for all of these topics is the object-oriented interface, so we will learn about that first.

Object-oriented versus MATLAB styles

So far in this book, we have seen a lot of examples, and in all of them we used the matplotlib.pyplot module to create and manipulate the plots, but this is not the only way to make use of the Matplotlib plotting power.

There are three ways to use Matplotlib:

• pyplot: The module used so far in this book

• pylab: A module to merge Matplotlib and NumPy together in an environment closer to MATLAB

• Object-oriented way: The Pythonic way to interface with Matplotlib

Let's first elaborate...