List of various useful resources around Matplotlib

This list is curated by Teresa Kubacka (pythonviz.blog). If you think a resource should be added, open an issue with your proposal!

TOC:

• List of various useful resources around Matplotlib
  • Cheat sheets
  • Books
  • Courses and workshops
  • Repositories with examples of complex visualizations
  • Tutorials
    • Community tutorials
    • Official tutorials you may have missed
  • Resources using the plt-API, but still useful
  • MPL-lore, history and other meta-level material
• MPL-compatible modules and extensions

Cheat sheets

• Official Cheat Sheets
• E2ML chapter by Brandon Rohrer
• How to cite Matplotlib (incl. Bibtex entry)

Books

• Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib by Nicolas P. Rougier
• Coding for Economists by Arthur Turrell
• Python Data Science Handbook by Jake VanderPlas

Courses and workshops

• Anatomy of Matplotlib - a SciPy course developed by the MPL team; a bit old but still very useful code
• NumFocus Academy - Matplotlib course (beginner) by Nicolas P. Rougier code
• Beyond the Basics: Data Visualization in Python by Stefanie Molin code
• PythonMaps Scipy 2022 by Adam Symington code video
• Ipywidgets and MPL interactions Scipy 2022 code video
• Neural Network Visualization by Brandon Rohrer code video
• Effectively using Matplotlib by Tim Hoffmann EuroSciPy 2019/2022 code
• Code, Debug, Reuse this Chart by Artem Kislovsky, AMLD 2024 code

Repositories with examples of complex visualizations

• Lisa-Ho
• diego-gonher
• symmy596 - geoviz
• Kaggle: A story told through a heatmap
• sonofacorner - sport viz
• asongtoruin
• rnckp - SNSF-Data-Starter, Thematic Mapping Switzerland

Tutorials

Community tutorials

• Engineering for data science - Blog
  • Plotting subplots in a loop
  • Using plt.suptitle
• DataFantic - Blog
  • Stylesheets
  • Reproducing The Economist style
• Blog of Gianluca Rigoletti:
  • ridgeplots
  • reproducing CERN ROOT stylesheet
  • multiple Y axes
• Pythonviz.blog:
  • Various useful snippets
  • Small-multiples charts from scratch
• Change font family
• How to create custom hatches: example 1 example 2 example 3. In future releases of Matplotlib there will be a different API to create custom hatches see discussion
• Son of a corner blog:
  • Create pretty tables from scratch
  • Coordinate systems
  • Rolling average xG charts from scratch
  • Stacked bars with annotations and icons from scratch
  • Footbal shot maps
• Practical Business Python:
  • Effectively Using Matplotlib
• Adam Ruszkowski's blog
  • Basic matplotlib Bar Plot Styling
• "Artist" in Matplotlib - something I wanted to know before spending tremendous hours on googling how-tos
• plt.xxx(), or ax.xxx(), That Is The Question In Matplotlib
• Christian Hill's blog - scientific visualizations and simulations with code examples
  • Christian Hill wrote a book "Learning Python for Scientific Applications" and the MPL examples from this book are available online
• Islamic Geometric Patterns
• Don't Use This Code
  • Recreate Tufte's weather visualization
• Gradient-filled patches and fill-betweens and method2
• A selection of tutorials that recreate R visualizations by Tomas Capretto and Yan Holtz on the Python-Graph-Gallery

Official tutorials you may have missed

• How to create custom tables by Tim Bayer
• Battery Charts by Rithwik Rajendran - create custom shapes, make them data driven
• Packed-bubble chart - chart as a class; more circle packing chart than bubble chart
• Tips on structuring your MPL code by the MPL Project Lead Thomas A Caswell
• yourplotlib - Best practices for domain-specific matplotlib libraries by Colin Carroll, Hannah Aizenman, and Thomas Caswell

Resources using the plt-API, but still useful

• Matplot GIF on Calmcode
• Matplotlib 3.0 Cookbook by Srinivasa Rao Poladi
• Python Graph Gallery - a treasure of visualizations, but unfortunately the APIs used are not consistent
• Learning Scientific Programming with Python - contains many interesting examples of mathematical visualizations with accompanying numpy/scipy algorithms, however the MPL API is sometimes inconsistent
• Minesweeper in MPL
• Advanced MPL with interactivity - 2013 tutorials by Jake Vanderplas

MPL-lore, history and other meta-level material

• John Hunter and Michael Droettboom explain the design choices they made
• Matplotlib Lead Developer Explains Why He Can’t Fix the Docs—But You Can
• John Hunter's talk "matplotlib: Lessons from middle age"
• Thoughts on how the MPL API could be more pythonic
• my own NormConf Lightning Talk How to stop crying when using Matplotlib
• John D. Hunter's IEEE paper introducing Matplotlib
• my talk on the Swiss Python Summit 2023, "Did you know Matplotlib could do that?": video and slides

MPL-compatible modules and extensions

Colors

• glasbey - Algorithmically create or extend categorical colour palettes
• tastymap - Easily create, modify and register cmaps, including an interactive widget

Fun

• ridge_map - A library for making ridge plots of... ridges. Choose a location, get an elevation map, and tinker with it to make something beautiful.

Styles

• opinionated - A stylesheet for newspaper-like visualization style
• VSCode Intellisense for .mplstyle and matplotlibrc files

Text and annotations

• flexitext - create colorful text strings easily using CSS-like specification