XKCDify

Sketchy, imprecise plotting theme for matplotlib.

Sometimes you want to illustrate a point and do not want to emphasize on accuracy but on overall relations. This code originated at jakevdp's blog <http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-matplotlib/>_.

Semi-log and log-log plots

Just take the logarithm before calling the plotting functions, i.e. give matplotlib the base-10 logarithms of the values. Then set the tick labels with the true values::

ax.set_xticks([-3, -2, -1], ['1e-3', '1e-2', '1e-1'])

Sometimes XKCDify also does not appreciate large/negative values. You can solve this by transformations into a space it likes.

References:

• http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-matplotlib/
• https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/1329