Matplotlib basics

[PinkShnack]

Matplotlib:

• Basic plots with plt
• Basic Axes plots
• subplots
• broken/joined/shared axes

[PinkShnack]

The second part of this notebook from the Python-Workshops module might be useful here.

[PinkShnack]

I guess for the first workshop we should focus on lay-out of a plot, right? Then, in the next workshop we can build on that by introducing the previous SciViz basics (colour etc.) and how to do these basics with Matplotlib.

[lucaswittwer]

Yes, let's start with the basis, e.g.,

• plotting directly with plt.plot
• labeling axes, adding title, adding legends
• How to store your figures in different formats, resolution etc.
• introducing how to work with fig = plt.figure(...), ax = fig.add_subplot(...)
• why you want to do this and what you can do with it (more fine-grained control over the axis, etc.)
• Changing figure ratio, adding sub-plots, etc.

In the end, we should try to cover more or less “the anatomy” of a plot (https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/showcase/anatomy.html)

[PinkShnack]

Exercises:

• B&W figure but we want to put it in a presentation with black background, so change figure to W&B.
• Use special characters in the legend and axis labels
• 3x3 figure, how to do it in a loop?

[PinkShnack]

Other possible topics here

• Unicode/Latex
• Annotation - uses different coordinate systems
• Figure sizes are in inches
  • Figure ratio in cm instead of inches (x 2.5)
• Vector images and raster images
  • saving images as tiff
• Do people have other ways of plotting that we don't know?