mpltex 0.4

1. Install

$ pip install mpltex

Required Packages

• matplotlib. Can be installed via pip install matplotlib.

• brewer2mpl. Can be installed via pip install brewer2mpl.

2. Usage

Examples and sample plots can be found here.

Following is a brief introduction. Just add one of mpltex decorators before your plot functions.

import mpltex

@mpltex.acs_decorator
def your_plot():
    # plot images by matplotlib ...

    # Save the image. Give a file name without extension.
    # You can also save figure outside your_plot if you like.
    fig.save_fig('/path/to/save/fig/figname')

# Then use your_plot in a normal way.
your_plot()

And it will create a plot ready for publishing in journals published by American Chemical Society (ACS).

mpltex also contains several helper functions to facilitate production of specific type of images. Following codes will produce a set of line arts with cycled line styles and line markers with the help of mpltex.linestyle_generator function.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import mpltex

@mpltex.acs_decorator
def your_plot():
    # ...   # generate data x and y
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(111)

    # The default line style is iterating over
    # color, line, and marker with hollow types.
    linestyles = mpltex.linestyle_generator()

    for i in range(number_of_lines):
        ax.plot(x[i], y[i], label=str(i), **linestyles.next())

    ax.locator_params(nbins=5)  # limit the number of major ticks
    ax.legend(loc='best')  # show legend in a best location
    fig.tight_layout(pad=0.1)  # make layout as tight as possible
    fig.savefig('/path/to/save/fig/figname')

Available Decorators

• mpltex.acs_decorator: output EPS images for publishing in ACS.

• mpltex.rsc_decorator: output EPS images for publishing in RSC.

• mpltex.presentation_decorator: output PDF images for presentation slides (Keynote).

• mpltex.web_decorator: output PNG images for web pages.