Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

By far my favorite feature of matplotlib is that it produces readable and accessible plots by default. Font sizes and linewidths are not too small, the default color palette is colorblind-friendly, and the default colormaps are perceptually uniform. Other software (for example Matlab and Mathematica) have absolutely terrible defaults and require a lot of fiddling to get the plots right.

View on HN

IMO the font size is still too small (ditto for pretty much all stat software). But matplotlib makes it quite easy to change the default look, here is mine:

    import matplotlib
    
    theme = {'axes.grid': True,
             'grid.linestyle': '--',
             'legend.framealpha': 1,
             'legend.facecolor': 'white',
             'legend.shadow': True,
             'legend.fontsize': 14,
             'legend.title_fontsize': 16,
             'xtick.labelsize': 14,
             'ytick.labelsize': 14,
             'axes.labelsize': 16,
             'axes.titlesize': 20,
             'figure.dpi': 100}
    
    matplotlib.rcParams.update(theme)

That fiddling used to drive me nuts in any of the tools I used to work with. It's part of the problem I'm trying to solve with my current open source project (evidence.dev) where we're tackling viz-as-code. You might find it interesting.

Previous HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

Tangential but a thing about defaults - when I was at uni, in a lot of labs we were doing data analysis and plotting in something called Origin. I absolutely loved the defaults there, to this day I can recognize if it was plotted using origin and I had visceral reaction if I'd see something done in Excel. Sane defaults are very important and I'm not sure why they are often afterthoughts

My only issue with it is that you need a lot of tweaking to get a compact layout. Other than that, it's a key part of what makes Python such an incredibly useful language.

> the default color palette is colorblind-friendly

No, it very much isn't. The second and third colors, the orange and the green, look extremely similar to protanopes (red deficiency). Fortunately, there's a plan to fix this for Matplotlib 4.0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com