Playing with Matplotlib style sheets | Hacker News Reader

Playing with Matplotlib style sheets

data21.io

35 pointsdata21_io16 comments

Why isn't this flagged? And why does this get upvotes? This a low-quality zero-content bait article. The same thing is right there in the matplotlib documentation [0]

[0] https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/style_sheets/style_she...

I have no affiliation and looked at both articles. It would have been nice for them to acknowledge where the plot design came from, since that’s a copy of their doc code. They did add a section on locating and applying a custom style sheet, and an introduction that read easily. That possibly enough.

I use matplotlib all the time and I didn't know about it. Maybe the documentation page is a better reference, but I'm happy the post was posted so I could learn about the existence of these stylesheets. I'd much rather see posts like this than links to twitter threads

The title is "playing with", but the article is just a gallery of EXISTING stylesheets. At the bottom is a blurb about how to make your own custom one by simply copying one that exists. There's almost zero content here other than "stylesheets exist".

I was using matplotlib yesterday - it is pretty rough. The style sheets will be helpful to make the colors better - but I also struggled with generating line thick enough to be meaningful, showing out enough to see the chart, and labeling data

It has its issues, but as someone who has used a Lot of MATLAB I will say the built-in colormaps of matplotlib are far superior. For personal stuff it's fine to rely on file exchange colormaps, but I feel less great about using external code in my academic and government work environments.

My quick and dirty trick is to set an alpha=0.8 to soften the default colors. It always looks better.

Indeed that does make charts look better. I do this for grid line:

ax.set_axisbelow(True) ax.grid(True, alpha=0.3)

I don't mind the default colormap (parula). If I'm using the color for any sort of dimension then I start to care about the colormap choices. Perceptually uniform and colorblind agnostic choices are important for any sort of publication, and arguably a starter for any sort of accessibility considerations.

Take a look at colorcet. https://colorcet.holoviz.org/

The four uniform colormaps that the page references are the value that I'm referring to. Viridis, plasma, inferno, and magma. I don't want a huge selection of colormaps, just a few good ones.

Here is where to get them on the file exchange. This really ought to just be folded into MATLAB proper releases somehow.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/51986-p...

Is there an experts guide to matplotlib for those who want to delve into creating sophisticated charts?

I can strongly recommend this book: https://github.com/rougier/scientific-visualization-book

I just spent the last hour browsing through the book and figures. Thanks! Lots of great inspiration in there.

The matplotlib documentation is very good, especially if you've used it before. However, it can be confusing when not using pyplot:

https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/index.html

Did not realise matplotlib had style sheets, that could have been useful. Thanks.

Also - unnecessarily gendered title?

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