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Using style sheets with matplotlib

Nicolás Guarín-Zapata

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We can format plots easily using the style package in matplotlib all. The main idea is to create a file with some of the parameters that want to be defined (that can also be accessed through rcParams).

This post is not a tutorial on how to use those, for that you can check the style sheet reference. Here, I just want to play with some of these parameters to create three different styles. The first two examples present the style of an (infamous by some) software, that is probably used for most people as their visualization platform, while the third one is just a clean style. All the files used here can be download here.

For all the examples below the following imports are done:

from __future__ import division, print_function
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

First example: MS 2003

In our first example we want to reproduce the style that we used to see more than a decade ago as default.

The following is the content of the file MS2003.mplstyle

font.family : sans-serif

axes.facecolor : c0c0c0
axes.edgecolor : black
axes.prop_cycle : cycler('color',['000080', 'FF00FF', 'FFFF00', '00FFFF','800080', '800000', '008080', '0000FF'])
axes.grid : True

axes.spines.left   : True
axes.spines.bottom : True
axes.spines.top    : True
axes.spines.right  : True

grid.color : black
grid.linestyle : -

lines.linewidth : 1

figure.figsize : 5, 3

legend.fancybox : False
legend.frameon : True
legend.facecolor : white
legend.edgecolor : black
legend.loc : center left

The following code use this style

style = "MS2003.mplstyle"
with plt.style.context(style):
    x = np.linspace(0, 4, 100)
    y = np.sin(np.pi*x + 1e-6)/(np.pi*x + 1e-6)
    fig = plt.figure()
    ax = plt.subplot(111)
    for cont in range(5):
        plt.plot(x, y/(cont + 1), label=cont)

    plt.gca().xaxis.grid(False)
    box = ax.get_position()
    ax.set_position([box.x0, box.y0, box.width * 0.8, box.height])
    plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5))

and this is the result

/images/MS2003_style.svg

Second example: MS 2007

In the second example we want to reproduce the offspring of the style in the first example. This is definitely an improvement over the previous style, but it is not perfect.

The following is the content of the file MS2007.mplstyle

font.family : sans-serif

axes.facecolor : white
axes.edgecolor : 4d4d4d
axes.prop_cycle : cycler('color',['4573a7', 'aa4644', '89a54e', '71588f','4298af', 'db843d', '93a9d0', 'd09392'])
axes.grid : True
axes.linewidth : 0.5

axes.spines.left   : True
axes.spines.bottom : True
axes.spines.top    : False
axes.spines.right  : False

lines.linewidth : 2

grid.color : 4d4d4d
grid.linestyle : -
grid.linewidth : 0.5

figure.figsize : 5, 3

legend.fancybox : False
legend.frameon : False
legend.facecolor : white
legend.edgecolor : 4d4d4d
legend.loc : center left

The following code use this style

style = "MS2007.mplstyle"
with plt.style.context(style):
    x = np.linspace(0, 4, 100)
    y = np.sin(np.pi*x + 1e-6)/(np.pi*x + 1e-6)
    fig = plt.figure()
    ax = plt.subplot(111)
    for cont in range(5):
        plt.plot(x, y/(cont + 1), label=cont)

    plt.gca().xaxis.grid(False)
    box = ax.get_position()
    ax.set_position([box.x0, box.y0, box.width * 0.8, box.height])
    plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5))

and this is the result

/images/MS2007_style.svg

Third example: a clean style

The last example is a clean style that uses a color palette taken from ColorBrewer.

The following is the content of the file clean_style.mplstyle

font.family : sans-serif

axes.facecolor : white
axes.prop_cycle : cycler('color',['e41a1c', '377eb8', '4daf4a', '984ea3', 'ff7f00', 'ffff33', 'a65628', 'f781bf'])
axes.linewidth : 0.0
axes.grid : True

lines.linewidth : 1.5

xtick.direction : in
ytick.direction : in

grid.color : c7dedf
grid.linestyle : -
grid.linewidth : 0.3

figure.figsize : 6, 4

legend.fancybox : False
legend.frameon : False
legend.loc : best

The following code use this style

style = "clean.mplstyle"
with plt.style.context(style):
    x = np.linspace(0, 4, 100)
    y = np.sin(np.pi*x + 1e-6)/(np.pi*x + 1e-6)
    fig = plt.figure()
    ax = plt.subplot(111)
    for cont in range(5):
        plt.plot(x, y/(cont + 1), label=cont)

    plt.legend()

and this is the result

/images/clean_style.svg

We can also use files that are stored remotely. For example, in the third example we could have used the following URL:

style = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicoguaro/matplotlib_styles/master/styles/clean.mplstyle"

Resources

As I mentioned above, the objective of this post was jut to create some simple-enough style-sheets for matplotlib and see them in action.

This post does not pretend to be a guide for good plots/visualization. For that matter you better look for some references, for example:

Also, I found really useful the following tools:

  • ColorBrewer2 allows to pick colormaps with different criteria (quantitative/qualitative, printer friendly, colorblind friendly).

  • ColRD has plenty of color palettes. It also has the option to generate palettes from images.

  • Colorgorical is a tool to make categorical color palettes for information visualization.

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